Mrs. Tameka "Tiny" Harris spoke to VIBE Magazine about she and Tip's real life Brady Bunch (which she calls The Harris Bunch), their relationship and how she's dealing with his absence.
LIFE WITHOUT TIP:
“It’s been like a roller coaster. Tip came home at the end of ’09, around Christmas time last year, and it was about getting the family back together.” But his career demanded attention, and he soon began work on his seventh album, No Mercy, as well as his third movie role [Takers]. “He started going back to work, so we was back to our regular schedule,” she recalls. “And then we got married. That was the high of the year, and then three months later he was gone—back again.”BEING A RAP STAR’S WIFE:
“I’ve been with him before he was all of that, and once he became this big sex symbol... I understood what was going to come with it because I had already been in the business,” she says. Tiny and T.I. began dating in 2001; and they’ve learned to adapt to the stresses of a showbiz relationship. “I’m just comfortable in my position and where I stand and what our values are,” says Tiny. “We’re on the same page. Plus, understand I’m with him maybe 85, 95 percent of the time. A lot of times, while all of the attention is going down, I’m right there. I never have to tell someone to back off. Normally he does it first. If it gets that far, he never lets it get disrespectful.”
FAMILY LIFE:
“I call it the Harris Bunch,” she says, laughing. “I have my daughter, Zonnique, which is the oldest, she’s 14, and she’s real mild-mannered. My next child, Messiah, he’s 10, he’s like the game boy. Then you have Domani, he’s 9. He’s very good with his hands, very crafty. He can build anything. Then I have Deyjah, she’s also 9. Nobody in the house really messes with her. Then I have King, he’s the monster of the group. He’s my 6-year-old. I don’t know, he’s a real mixture of me and his dad. Very manipulative. He can manipulate his way out of whatever. They say that about me, too.” She flashes a knowing smile. “Then we have Major, which is the 2-year-old. He’s the rough one.”
THE HONEYMOON THAT NEVER WAS:
“We didn’t really get a chance to go on a honeymoon, because he had to go to work three days after the wedding,” she says. They flew to Los Angeles for the premiere of Tip’s film Takers, and made plans for a honeymoon. “We were just enjoying life. The day that we got caught in California, when the incident happened, we were supposed to be going to the Virgin Islands, because he can’t really go a lot of places, so we had to find somewhere where we could just go. But they were having a hurricane and we weren’t able to go. And when I think back, I’m just like, ‘Why wasn’t we there? Because if we were, we wouldn’t be having this trouble right now. But you know, things happen for a reason. It is what it is.”
Check MORE DISH for behind the scenes pics at the Harris house
Source: VIBE
