Real Housewives of Atlanta: Kenya Moore struggles during her separation with Marc Daly

Kenya Moore struggled to pack up ex Marc Daly’s clothes as their separation intensified on Sunday’s episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

The 49-year-old haircare mogul stood in front of a wall of his shirts, looking despondently at pal Cynthia Bailey, 53, who’d come to help her out.

Kenya and Marc separated in September 2019 after two years of marriage, and were not speaking to each other at the time of the episode.

‘If he wants his stuff, he can have his stuff,’ Kenya told Cynthia, noting that while she didn’t talk to Marc, he regularly FaceTimed with their daughter Brooklyn, 1, and the nanny.

‘What if he changes his mind and wants to come back home?’ Cynthia asked her.

‘Then he can send the stuff back,’ Kenya offered wearily. ‘But he has got to make the first move and let me know he wants this marriage.’

Cynthia knew in her heart that Marc was showing no signs he wanted to repair the union.

‘Is it all up to Marc to decide?’ she queried Kenya. ‘I’m not telling you to give up on your marriage. But I’m just saying: YOU can’t save this marriage. Y’ALL have to save this marriage.’

She felt Kenya had only put up with horrible behavior from Marc because of Brooklyn.

Kenya said she was stronger than that, noting, ‘My whole idea was, ‘I have to be my husband’s ride-or-die,’ but what I will never be is just somebody’s punching bag. Or doormat.’

She startled Cynthia by telling her, ‘I don’t have access to his family. I don’t have the common decency of just being able to pick up the phone and FaceTime Brooklyn with her grandmother.’

Her friend couldn’t believe Marc hadn’t even given his wife his parents’ contact information.

She picked up scissors and held them to an arm on one of Marc’s shirts. ‘Should we do short sleeves?’ she asked Kenya. ‘Should we make a muscle shirt out of it?’

‘From everything that you’ve told me, honestly, I’m like, ‘F*** you,’ Cynthia related.

‘I don’t know, Cynthia,’ Kenya said, her voice breaking. ‘This is just very hard, and this is not what I thought a marriage would be like.’

Cynthia hugged her, saying, ‘You are deserving of love and respect, Kenya.’

‘If Marc can turn around and be that husband, then I am praying for you guys and rooting for you guys. But if he can’t? Then I’m praying that you have strength to continue your journey.’

In a voiceover, Kenya spoke of her affection for her husband, who was often away for work.

‘I remember when I put the first shirt in that closet,’ she said. ‘Or when we bought his first pair of shoes from New York. He would come every week and little by little, build his closet. And how neat he kept it! Even if he wasn’t there that day, he was still there because I could see his shirts and smell his cologne.’

‘It’s just very hard to now imagine that it won’t be there. Then what? It feels like an empty home.’

To Cynthia she said, ‘Let’s let the movers do this, because I just don’t wanna see ’em pack up, and I’ll just put some paper on the door, so when I walk past I don’t see it.’

‘Baby steps,’ Cynthia reassured her. ‘Day by day. Every day, it’s gonna get a little easier.’

Early in the episode, Kenya spoke to their friend Kandi Burruss, 43, about her marriage.

She told Kandi that she hadn’t spoken to Marc recently but also admitted that he was still blocked on her phone, saying, ‘When he learns how to talk to me, I will take him off block.’

‘If he’s not willing to work on it, I’m not left with anything,’ Kenya explained. ‘It’s just like, ‘What am I working with?’ We literally had everything, and it just went to hell.’

Kandi was worried that her marriage to Todd Tucker was similarly fraying at the seams, and she cried as she told Kenya about the arguments they’d had over her heavy work schedule.

In a confessional, she revealed that she helped a number of friends and family, saying, ‘I’m the one who comes through for everybody when something goes wrong.’

Kenya noted that Todd had been understanding about Kandi’s recent sex scene on the TV show The Chi, pointing out that it couldn’t have been easy for him as her husband.

‘How much money do you want to make, girl?’ she wondered privately. ‘You got it all. But how often do you get this beautiful dream family?’

‘Sometimes I wish that Marc was more like Todd. Please, the money you already have. But how often does a great love come around?’

Cynthia was trying to figure out the kinks in her own relationship with fiancé Mike Hill, 49, a FOX sportscaster who lived in Los Angeles.

She needed to go to L.A. to figure out where they’d be living once they married, and to see her daughter Noelle, 20, who’d been pursuing an acting career out there.

But the thought of moving there permanently was daunting, as she’d been having friction with her sister Malorie, who would be helping to run the Bailey Wine Cellar in her absence.

For her part, Porsha Williams, 38, was trying to get her fiancé Dennis McKinley to move back in with her and their daughter PJ, 1, after they survived his cheating scandal last year.

Dennis balked at the idea, saying, ‘I ain’t about to move all my stuff back in here, then you get mad, then you put all my s***’ back out.’

‘There was a reason that that happened before,’ Porsha said dryly. ‘You do realize you would’ve still been here if you hadn’t done what you did.’

Porsha told him she wanted to plan a wedding, but Dennis just wanted to ‘go get married.’

‘Why are you saying that?’ Porsha asked. ‘That’s not cool, ’cause you didn’t feel like that before. Before, you wanted to have a baby shower, and do it up big. You wanted to have a gender reveal and do it up big, and invite everybody. Now that you done something to me, that you feel other people may be judging or whatnot, that you wanna close off the wedding to people?’

‘I’m not paying for people’s plates that don’t really care about what’s going on,’ Dennis said.

When he brought up the fact that they needed to sign a prenup, Porsha called him ‘mean’ and refused to give him any of the cookies she’d made, shoveling them into her own napkin.

NeNe Leakes, 52, and her husband Gregg Leakes, 65, seemed at first to be doing better than their castmates, celebrating their 23th anniversary in romantic fashion.

NeNe decorated the floor of their bedroom with rose petals, put champagne by the bed and dressed up in a silky peignoir, twirling around to give him a show.

‘I guess I’m definitely one of those cases, babe, where they say you get married for better or worse,’ Gregg admitted. ‘My worse sometimes get in the f***ing front.’

In 2019, Gregg battled stage 3 colon cancer, underwent surgery and wore a colostomy bag that NeNe later revealed had them sleeping in separate bedrooms.

‘This past year was really hard on our relationship,’ NeNe recalled in a confessional. ‘Gregg’s health was down, and we couldn’t be intimate.’

The two of them had discussed having an open marriage, but ‘he’s a guy,’ she said. ‘He don’t want anybody else, as he says, ‘eating out of his garden.’

The two of them crawled over the pillows into their big bed and talked about their year.

‘Last year was the first time since we known each other that we didn’t sleep together,’ NeNe recounted, as Gregg remembered, ‘When I got home [from treatment], I couldn’t climb those steps.’

‘And then you had to protect me,’ NeNe said. ‘I could not be a part of the radiation.’

She turned to him, asking, ‘Should we watch a movie?’

‘Let’s make a movie,’ Gregg replied. ‘My nickname’s gonna be ‘Backdoor Billy.’

Elsewhere, Eva Marcille, 35, showed Cynthia the new home into which she’d just moved with husband Michael Sterling and her three kids.

She told Cynthia that Kevin McCall, the father of her daughter Marley, 5, was seeking joint custody and wanted to change Marley’s last name from Sterling back to McCall.

Kandi decided she didn’t want to experience the kind of relationship problems her friends had been having, and asked a couples’ therapist named Machel to come to her home.

Todd told Machel that he and Kandi had been ‘so focused on success that we’ve become great business partners… we just haven’t had time to be happy together lately.’

He felt that Kandi’s priorities were career, friends, and family, in that order—and his wife cried as she admitted that she would do anything to help someone she knew.

Todd said that sometimes Kandi would be off doing something for someone else and their son Ace, 3, would get into bed and say, ‘Where’s Mommy?’

Their sex life had suffered, too, Todd revealed, as Machel insisted they work on connecting.

‘That’s what I want the two of you to focus on: Just Todd and Kandi time,’ he said.

The Real Housewives of Atlanta Season 12 finale airs next week on Bravo.