Sutton Stracke and ex-husband Christian Stracke’s coparenting dynamic hit a snag when he relocated across the pond to London.
“He moved in June [2023], and it’s been difficult,” Sutton, 52, exclusively told Us Weekly on Tuesday, January 23, while discussing the current season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. “We coparent very well together, but it’s hard to coparent with someone that’s in England and I’m in California, so it’s like, the time [difference] is really far.”
Sutton and Christian, 52, were married between 2000 and 2016 and share three kids: daughter Porter, 21, and sons Philip, 20, and James, 17. While both Porter and Philip attend college out of state, James is still in high school in California.
“I have my son with me all the time. Every time I turn around, he’s there, he’s there. I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s James,’” Sutton revealed to Us. “And meanwhile, [this is] a very big part of my life where I’m busy and working.”
She continued, “I was used to week-on, week-off, week-on, week-off, and that’s how I developed my schedule, [but] I can’t do that anymore. This month of January has been really busy with work, and I had to tell [James], ‘Look, January is going to be crazy, and then it’s going to calm down,’ and he understands that we have to work together, the two of us.”
As a result, Sutton and James have “gotten really close.”
“Closer than you would think a mother and a teenage boy would get,” she joked. “I always call us the ‘odd couple.’ I make dinner, we eat, we watch our show [and] we talk, we hang out together. And so, in a way, it’s this very strange blessing that Christian gave me [when he moved], because I get James, my son, with me all the time, so thank you, Christian.”
While Sutton admitted that their family situation “is not easy,” it’s “working” right now. “It’s a blessing,” she gushed.
Sutton balances parenthood with work at her eponymous fashion boutique and filming episodes of RHOBH.
“We had a night where just Erika [Jayne], Garcelle [Beauvais] and I [were filming and we] had the best time,” Sutton recalled to Us of season 13. “The three of us just relaxed, and I think we all three were surprised at how much fun we had together. We kept saying, ‘We have to do this again off camera because we have a lot in common.’”
Sutton noted that the threesome is alike because they are divorced single mothers and all “kind of pretty funny.”
“They make fun of me, which is fine, but we like to talk about all kinds of different topics and [we’re] really smart businesswomen, and so it was a really good trio,” Sutton quipped.
While Sutton has enjoyed her RHOBH tenure, her three kids are not big fans of watching her on reality TV.
“The first season we watched because it was COVID, so we didn’t have anything else to watch. So they’re like, ‘Let’s watch Mommy on TV.’ And now I think my daughter watches it and she’s a senior in college now. My middle son is over it, and James has never watched it,” she said on Tuesday. “This season I’ve been a bit more risqué, [like at] that dinner from hell, [I] whipped out [a] joint and I told them that I did this, and then I talked to them about smoking marijuana and [asked], ‘Do you?’ and I said, ‘Don’t.’ So, I got to have conversations with them because I did that.”
Elsewhere in season 13, Sutton reentered the dating scene post-divorce by hiring a matchmaker.
“I’m talking more about my own sexuality and things like that,” Sutton said, noting she is still single but no longer working with the matchmaker. “My daughter and I have had conversations about it. So [the show] has allowed me to get closer to them.”
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills airs on Bravo Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
