Anderson Cooper Wishes His Ex Had Lied to Him About This One Thing

Anderson wanted Maisani to lie when he missed Wyatt take his first steps.

After spending a lot of time at home with baby Wyatt during the pandemic, Anderson finally had to get back to traveling for work. When he was away, he missed a monumental moment in Wyatt's life, the journalist told late-night host Stephen Colbert on June 16. "I was going to Israel last week. It was my first work trip for 60 Minutes, and I was doing an interview, and I get this text from Wyatt's other dad, Benjamin," Anderson recalled. "He said, 'He just walked!!'"

While the audience cooed some "aw's" in chorus, Cooper had a very different attitude about it. "My reaction was fury," he said. He explained that he would have preferred Maisani lie to him about the situation. "In my household, when I grew up, you would lie about everything. He should have just lied. He should have lied and said, 'Oh no, he's not walking at all.' So when I got home, and he walked, we'd all be like, 'Oh my god! It's the first walk!'"

Anderson may be bitter about missing this milestone, but he is grateful for all the little moments with Wyatt, too. "Getting to see my little boy’s joy-filled face every day, and watching him grow, is the best present I could ever receive," Anderson wrote beside a recent Instagram post on his birthday.

RELATED: See Anderson Cooper's Son Wyatt Watch Him on TV for the First Time.

Wyatt is now both walking and talking.

After finally seeing his son walk, Anderson described his gait like that of a "drunken sailor," and his speech is coming along, too. When Colbert asked if the one year old was talking yet, Anderson joked, "He talks in a dialect of Hindu or Urdu, I'm not sure." While his conversations may be difficult for Cooper to understand, the proud dad is impressed nonetheless. "It's incredible. It's a really interesting dialect. He doesn't make any sense at this point, but he's really committed to it," he said.

Of course, in his dad's eyes, Wyatt can do no wrong. When he turned one on April 27, Anderson wrote in an Instagram birthday tribute that his son is "sweet and funny, happy and kind, and I love him more than I ever thought possible."

Anderson said he used to avoid Father's Day until Wyatt was born.

Anderson said he didn't even realize that this weekend was Father's Day until someone on Colbert's staff asked him how he was celebrating. The CNN anchor, who lost his dad, also named Wyatt Cooper, when he was 10 years old, said, "Father's Day was something I avoided. I just did not acknowledge it." He said "the pain was so great" for the majority of his life that he didn't know when the holiday fell exactly.

"For anybody out there that lost a parent early, holidays and especially Father's Day when you don't have a dad, it's not even bittersweet," Anderson said, lost for words to describe the feeling. Colbert, who also lost his father at the age of 10, jumped in and said it's "inexplicable."

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Anderson feels more connected to his late family now that he's a father.

Anderson has experienced a lot of loss in his life. His brother Carter Cooper died by suicide at the age of 23, and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, passed away in 2019. Anderson said having a son has helped him connect with his family in a way that he "never anticipated." He told Colbert, "I feel like I'm in communion with them in some strange way, and I remember things about my dad that I never remembered before because I'm experiencing them with Wyatt as a dad."

In Anderson's home, a portrait of his parents, painted by his mother, hangs outside Wyatt's room, and every morning, the baby insists on going over and touching it. Choking back tears as Colbert held up this photo, Anderson added that it's "really wonderful."

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