“I never wanted to negatively speak about Apollo,” Parks exclusively tells PEOPLE. “At the end of the day, Apollo is the children’s father. And so I want them to be able to make their own opinions about who he is as a father.”
“I respect my children too much,” she continues. “I don’t want them to look back on television, tabloids or something I said that will make them feel like their father was not a great father. I’m always doing things to err on the side of not saying anything if I can’t say anything that’s not nice about him. It was important to me to maintain some privacy around it.”
But not talking negatively about Nida is one thing. Keeping that part of her life secret from her RHOA co-stars is another. So why didn’t Parks confide more in her fellow co-stars?
“None of them had been supportive throughout the process,” she says. “So I knew their questions weren’t coming from a place of support — it was from a place of being nosy, wanting to know what was going on with my marriage and the divorce.”
The clearest example of that came from a scene this season when Parks’ longtime frenemy Kenya Moore threw her a”divorce party” — a surprise event that sent Parks leaving in anger.
“When we make light of it on the show and trivialize marriage, for me it’s somewhat disgusting,” Parks explained. “Because at the end of the day, there’s such a breakdown of the family unit in the United States. When you can pin and correlate very tragic events to the demise of a family, it lets me know that it’s very important to make sure that the family unit stays in tact.”
“No marriage can survive everything, but we have to respect the boundaries of people’s marriages,” she adds. “On reality shows, I think they glamorize the downfall of marriage. And I didn’t want to be a part of that.”
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