Turns out there’s something to that whole time-heals-all-wounds cliché. Because more than a year after Teen Mom stars Maci Bookout and Ryan Edwards committed themselves to truly co-parenting 15-year-old son Bentley, the exes are still hopping along, even getting together for a joint Easter celebration March 31.
“Who would have thought?” Maci marveled to E! News in an exclusive interview, revealing they have been able to maintain a healthy relationship. “It’s definitely been hard. But I think we have been able to maintain this mutual respect.”
Where in the past a miscommunication could easily lead to a massive fight, now, “If one of us has a question, we are not afraid to call each other and the other pick up the phone,” she explained. “It’s like, ‘What do you want to do about that? How do you want to handle this?’ The communication is just so much more respectful. And I would say it’s just easier.”
And, dare she say, she, husband Taylor McKinney, Ryan and his new girlfriend Amanda Conner are one big, happy-ish family.
“Ryan and I got back to a place where we’re actually just friends,” Maci explained. Now they enjoy a mutual respect for one another and “just a bit more caring about how you talk to somebody or how you handle something. And I think that’s been able to really drive the co-parenting because we enter those conversations in a more gentle way, in a more understanding way.”
Though that’s not to say they nail it every single time.
“Still got a long way to go—don’t get me wrong,” Maci allowed. “But I can’t believe we’re, like, a year and some months into it and things are still very good. We’ve still got a long way to go for where I think a normal co-parenting relationship could be, but I think naturally it’s moving in a way that works for everybody, especially Bentley.”
And that’s in part because everyone on Team Bentley has committed to following one straightforward rule.
“We actually try and leave Bentley out of a lot of that,” Maci explained of their parental chats. While she’s been open with Bentley about everything from Ryan’s 2023 overdose to his legal trouble and rehab stays, when it comes to his parents navigating their relationship, “Bentley really shared with me that he doesn’t want to know certain things or be asked certain things.”
So while she acknowledged it’s a bit of a you-live-you-learn situation (“It’s not that I think it was wrong,” she said of involving Bentley more in the past, “it’s just that I didn’t know any better”), her new motto is that “he doesn’t need to know anything he doesn’t need to know,” Maci noted. “We will definitely be like, ‘Hey, do you want to do this?’ Or, ‘Do you want to go over here?’ Because he’s a teenager, you never know what mood he’s in. But besides that, it’s just really leaving him out of it, letting the adults have the adult conversations.”
As for the adults in the room, Maci and Taylor, also parents to Jayde, 8, and Maverick, 7, appreciated the reset they were given while filming the current third season of Teen Mom: Family Reunion.
“Truth be told, walking into it, I was like, Oh, great, we get to be away from the kids, be with each other and hang out with our friends,” said Maci of signing on for the experience. “Like, it’s a vacation. I’m not sure we were expecting all of the work we were going to have to do when we got there.”
But after committing to the homework, they aced their relationship class.
“Getting away from the kids for a little while, really helped us reset and realize, like, ‘Hey, we are on the same team,'” said Taylor. “That just gave us the time to reset and reconnect.”
