Will Smith reflects on the moment he became a father for the first time.
On Saturday, the Oscar winner, 55, honored his eldest son Trey Smith’s 31st birthday with a touching Instagram video in which he remembered his son’s birth more than three decades ago.
Will captioned the video with a touching message: “Happy Bday, T-Ball. You are responsible for some of the highest experiences of my life,” he began, adding, “You introduced me to the true definition of Love! I met God in your eyes.”
Will’s video, which looked to be shot when he was working on the audiobook for his 2021 biography, featured the actor ruminating on the day Trey was born before reading lyrics from his 1997 song “Just the Two of Us.”
“On November 11, 1992, Willard Carroll Smith III was born. “We called him Trey from birth because he was the third Willard Smith,” Will remarked at the start of the video.
He then began singing words from the first stanza of Big Willie Style, including “That night I don’t think one wink I slept. As I slipped out my bed, to your crib I crept. Touched your head gently, felt my heart melt. ‘Cause I know I loved you more than life itself. Then to my knees, and I begged the Lord please. Let me be a good daddy, all he needs. Love, knowledge, discipline too. I pledge my life to you.”
“That’s the public depiction of Trey’s birth and my first introduction to fatherhood,” Will said in the video. “But that first night was far more emotionally tumultuous than my poetic verse suggests.”
The actor then claimed that he was overwhelmed with the magnitude of the responsibilities that lay ahead of him and that he went to his knees and asked God for help in becoming “a good daddy.”
“Could I put food on the table and keep the lights on without fail? Would I be strong enough to fend off someone who came to kill him? It’s 3 a.m., I’m on my knees, I’m just a little boy. I never wanted my daddy so bad in my life,” Will says in the video.
“And then, something clicked. Deep in a place where nothing had ever clicked before. A decision. An iron-clad conviction. I wiped my tears, I stood up, I gently touched Trey’s head,” he added. “And I knew there were only two possibilities, I was gonna be the best father this planet had ever seen. Or two, I was gonna be dead.”
Many friends and admirers responded in the comments area to Will’s poignant Instagram post to his son, including Chance the Rapper, Busta Rhymes, and DJ Jazzy Jeff, who wrote “Happy birthday nephew.”
“THIS IS SO POWERFUL!! LOVE THIS,” Rhymes wrote.
Trey is shared by Will and his ex-wife Sheree Zampino, who also paid homage to her son on Instagram. “Happy 31st Birthday my LOVE,” she wrote beside a photo of her kid in focus, but herself and another man in the background were both somewhat blurred.
The Emancipation actor also has two additional children with Jada Pinkett Smith, son Jaden, 25, and daughter Willow, 23.
Pinkett Smith, 52, also wished Will’s eldest son a happy birthday on Instagram, saying, “Happy Birthday @treysmith0011!!!! You are one of the most incredible human beings I know and I love you beyond anything you could ever imagine”
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