When Britani Bateman first joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City as a “friend of,” she made her strained relationship with her daughters clear. Hurt by their mom’s tendency to put her romantic relationships first, Taylor and Olivia Bateman gave the show, and their mom, a wide berth. In season 6, things changed.
Olivia, the youngest of Britani’s two daughters with her ex-husband, made her appearance on the show in an October episode, beginning a painful and ongoing process of repairing her relationship with her mom.
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Britani & Olivia Bateman Find Common Ground
The 20-year-old opened up about years of competing with romantic partners, including her current on-off boyfriend Jared Osmond, for her mom’s affections.
“Things were good until she divorced my dad,” Olivia later explained in an on-camera therapy session shown in a November 25 episode. “She did get [remarried] fairly quickly. He was kind of her whole world, and we weren’t her priority. We weren’t even close to being her priority.… We didn’t talk for a while. From my perspective, it was seven years of her neglecting her children.”
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City has never been go there. Across the past several seasons, Mary Cosby worked through her son’s addiction and Bronwyn Newport addressed her past trauma with her mom. But Britani’s fearlessness in showing her flaws as a parent has been monumental for the show and, as she and Olivia tell SheKnows, for her relationship with her kids.
“It’s reputed to be like a relationship breaker, and for us, it was a relationship repairer,” she tells SheKnows in a joint interview with Olivia.
In the video above, the pair joined us in studio alongside Britani’s dad and Olivia’s older sister, who prefer to remain off camera, for their first interview about repairing their relationship and made it clear that it’s all a work in progress.
“We still have issues,” Olivia says. “I think that’s been kind of hard. Like, yes, we’re making progress, but it’s not perfection.”
“Thankfully, it’s like five steps forward, one or two steps back, because it feels like now that we’ve recovered the base of our relationship,” Britani adds. “It’s super easy to get through the hurdles, because we know that there’s that base of love and acceptance there.”
Olivia, who admits that she initially didn’t want to appear in the Bravo show, says coming back together with her mom forced her to confront issues she was ignoring. “We say that we owe it to the show for bringing us together, for sitting down and having hard conversations that I think both of us weren’t willing to have,” she explains.
As Real Housewives viewers have seen, the central issue in their relationship was Britani’s struggle to balance her love life with her responsibilities to her kids. During Olivia’s first appearance on the show she revealed that the last time she tried to hang out with her mom, she spent most of the time “making out” with Jared, her controversial sometimes-fiancé who has been the source of much drama on the show.
“What I’m learning in therapy is that it’s going to be this constant tug of war,” says Britani of how she prioritizes relationships now, noting that being an empty-nester has left her craving a love life. “I just need to be more sensitive and think, ‘What would Olivia want me to do in this situation, and be proactive about it.’”
So how does Olivia want her mom to navigate her relationship with Jared? “I have lots of thoughts that I tell her behind closed doors,” she tells us. “But I understand that she says this is the love of her life, and that she’s gonna be with him forever… or for the rest of the week. And I respect that.”
Olivia admits that her feelings are different than when she was 12 years old and struggling to handle her mom’s since-ended second marriage. “I’m not gonna have to be raised by whoever you marry, so I feel differently about it,” Olivia tells her mom before adding, “I tell her my opinions very brutally, but also she’s free to date whoever she wants. I don’t think I should have any say in that now that I’m an adult.”
Britani and Olivia are proud of where they are now. “Since we’ve stopped filming, we have not stopped working on our relationship,” Olivia says. “A lot of people are shocked to see us together, and I just don’t think that they realize that we first met up in that coffee shop seven months ago. So we’ve had a lot of time to build our relationship, which has been good.” As a testament to how far they’ve come, Olivia even pushed through her hatred of hugs to allow her touchy-feely mom to give her an embrace. If that’s not love, what is?