At Hailie’s wedding, 50 Cent was so emotional he could cry. Time flies, he realised. And it’s time to hit the road.
When asked if he had everything in life he wanted, Fifty is content to confirm. Except for one thing that came to the surface after he attended Hailie’s wedding.
“I wish I had a daughter,” he admits during our June Zoom session, repeating the sentiment earnestly. “I do. I wish I had a daughter.”
He’s always regretted not having a little girl, though he is a father of two: his sons Marquise and Sire are, respectively, 28 and 12. “I wish I had that [father-daughter] relationship. For female children, their dad is the first man they fall in love with. Male children go to their mom; I’m a mama’s boy myself.”
It seems like Jackson started feeling broody after attending the May wedding of Eminem’s daughter, Hailie Jade, in Michigan, citing, in fact, the relationship between his longtime friend and his little girl as a recent trigger.
“It was unbelievable, the wildest thing for me, period. I was like, ‘Yo, bro, this is crazy. We’re getting old. Your baby is grown. What the fuck is going on?’ I was having a moment myself over there. I told Em, ‘You said it was OK to cry, because I’m crying.’ I couldn’t believe it went that fast.”
He explains that he’s been trying to get Eminem on tour for years, but the Detroit-born rapper was adamant that he couldn’t until Hailie had grown up. “That was the difference between my experience and Em’s. I could always go out on the road, but with Hailie, it was different. Like if she’s looking at you and she doesn’t want you to leave and you go ‘no, I’ve got to work.’ [And she says] But really, do you have to go?’ ‘OK, maybe I don’t have to go.’ If that was the case, things might have changed for me.”
Still, he says it felt like yesterday that he and Em discussed going on tour together, and his friend declined. “Em was saying that he didn’t want to go everywhere in the world where I went. I would say to him that people would pay a gazillion dollars to see us on tour together, all kinds of money to see him perform. And he still did not care about that, because the most expensive thing that we have is time, and he was conscious of being there for Hailie growing up.”
But now that she has officially fled the nest, it’s time. “We should be on the run now; [the kids are] grown,” he insists.