Bravo star Jeff Lewis and ex Gage Edward don’t always see eye-to-eye when it comes to coparenting their 10-year-old daughter, Monroe.
“It hasn’t really gotten any easier. I think, if anything, it’s gotten worse,” Lewis, 56, exclusively told Us on Tuesday, November 10, while promoting the new season of his Bravo reality TV series, Still Flipping Out. “It’s [been] eight years. I don’t really have any sort of explanation for it.”
He continued, “I very much would like to move on and move forward, and I think we would have if we didn’t have a child. I think if we didn’t have a child together, I think we both would have moved on with our separate lives.”
Lewis and Edward, 42, welcomed Monroe via surrogate in 2016, three years before the then-couple called it quits. Lewis revealed via Instagram in May 2021 that the exes settled their “contentious” custody battle, agreeing to alternate custody of Monroe.
“Because we have to stay in communication, we don’t really see eye-to-eye. I raise her differently than he raises her,” Lewis acknowledged on Tuesday. “Doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, I think it’s probably a nice balance. He’s a little stricter than I am, but we’re stricter with different things. I think what’s important for him is not as important for me. What’s important for me is not as important for him, but we just don’t totally align.”
Even so, Lewis wishes certain aspects of their dynamic “could be handled a little better.”
“This is what I tell myself every day: ‘I’m very, very grateful. I wake up happy. I think everything is going well in my life. But we all have our things, right?’” he added. “Some people struggle with a lot worse than Gage. I don’t know what’s worse, but there are worse things than Gage.”
While Lewis and Edward may not always get along, they do have one common boundary with raising Monroe.
“I would love to share Monroe with the audience. However, this is … truly the one singular thing that Gage and I agree on, which is we believe she’s too young to be on TV,” he said of keeping Monroe out of the limelight. “She has a mouth on her. She’s like me, and I get a little worried how the audience would receive her. I don’t want to subject her to any criticism. I really don’t have that much control over the edit.”
He added, “I think it’s best that she stays off camera for now. Look, we’ll have this conversation if she wants to be on Next Gen L.A. … [and] if they want to film you from college, Monroe, that’s fine.”
Lewis recently returned to Bravo for Still Flipping Out, balancing his design empire and other professional commitments. (Lewis previously starred on the network’s Flipping Out, which ran for 11 seasons, from 2007 to 2018.)
“It doesn’t feel any different. I did it for 11 years,” he said of his reality TV return. “I had three shows on that network. I just, kind of, settled right back in. I think that I understand how things are filmed now a bit differently, so that might change the way I look at how it’s filmed, right?”
Still Flipping Out airs on Bravo Mondays at 9 p.m. ET and streams the next day on Peacock.
