Читать книгу Britney: Inside the Dream - Steve Dennis - Страница 10

‘Mama, do you want to live like

this for the rest of your life?’

–Britney to Lynne Spears, 2000

Through the Storm was the title of Lynne Spears’ memoir about coping in a world of fame and tabloid headlines. Perhaps it would also be an apt label to sum up the strife and struggle within the household as Britney grew up. Indeed, in the year preceding her conception, it was already evident that Lynne was emotionally and psychologically defeated by her husband’s behaviour.

In her memoir, she admits filing for divorce before Britney’s birth, without detailing why. The clear impression is that her reason was solely because of Jamie’s drinking. Yet this masks the true background; a history that Lynne clearly isn’t keen on forming part of the Britney Spears’ story. Instead, after acknowledging the ‘wrecking balls’ and upset Jamie’s drinking created, she reflected that the first five years of their marriage were ‘an oasis of calm and happiness in our often turbulent life together.’ But that’s not the story contained in the legal papers she served just three years and six months into their union.

Lynne filed for divorce on grounds of adultery. This, perhaps, explains why she had no desire to reveal the finer details, going no further than mentioning gossip about his ‘flirting’ at bars. Intended or otherwise, by not mentioning infidelity as the reason behind her divorce petition, the focus remains on Jamie not her; on his addiction, not her desirability; his irresponsibility and not the humiliation she felt when he chose to have sex with someone else—and in their marital home.

According to the petition, Jamie committed adultery on the evening of Christmas Day, 1979. Heartbroken and livid, Lynne wasted no time in consulting local attorney Lou Sherman. Eight days later, and on the first working day after New Year, she submitted a detailed petition to the courts. It was this stormy prelude that foreshadowed the ‘dysfunctional marriage’ that Britney was born into and, as will become clear, this would prove to be a highly relevant event.

For Lynne, the betrayal followed a prolonged period of enduring her husband’s ‘benders’. In her book, she lays bare his alcoholism and told how he’d gone missing on Christmas Day morning as she and two-year-old Bryan waited to open gifts. When he didn’t show, she packed a bag and went to her mother’s. There must have been a furious row because Jamie clearly realised he’d be spending Christmas alone and that Lynne had deserted him. If she didn’t know what her husband would do, she soon found out.

In her petition, she makes allegations of cheating, and told how Jamie was seen entering one of his regular hangouts, a Kentwood bar called Baby Tate’s. But he went in with a local woman who Lynne named. Inside, it was claimed, he was ‘observed hugging, kissing and fondling this woman throughout their stay’. From there, she writes, they went to the Spears’ trailer, ‘where he committed adultery…during the late evening hours of December 25th and the early morning hours of December 26th.’

And therein lies another truth that has never previously emerged: the origins of the Britney Spears’ story can be traced to a trailer park where the family had their first home. Simpson’s Trailer Park, located off Highway 51 in Kentwood, two minutes from the state line with Mississippi, was where matrimonial life began for Jamie and Lynne. Lot No. 13 housed a cramped but cosy trailer that Lynne had helped fill with appliances and furniture; it was their first purchase as a couple along with a 1979 Chevrolet, a 1978 Dr Lincoln Continental and a 4-wheel drive pick-up truck. One trailer and three vehicles represented their humble beginnings. It was here that the family lived with their only son, and it was here that Jamie was alleged to have marked Christmas with his lover.

A friend who has known the Spears since they married said: ‘Y’all must understand. Miss Lynne is mighty proud. Image and reputation matter, especially since she’s become known as Britney’s mama. She don’t want to be seen as “white trailer-park trash” because that ain’t Miss Lynne. She’s always wanted to be viewed as a lady.’

Just like her English mother, Lillian.

Trailer-park homes and little shacks on the roadside are the norm in Kentwood and no one bats an eyelid over such realities, but perhaps its juxtaposition alongside Britney’s stardom felt uncomfortable for Lynne Spears. Britney wasn’t to spend a single day of her life in a trailer, but if anything, these beginnings further enrich the family history. From a trailer park to ‘Serenity’ is far more inspiring than from ranch-style bungalow to ‘Serenity’. It illustrates how far the Spears have travelled in the past 30 years.

According to the legal papers, the trailer belonged to Lynne. In fact, she was greatly worried that Jamie would damage it, and her furniture, when he learned she was filing for a divorce. She clearly feared his temper and she even alluded to what he was capable of when drunk. In that same petition, her attorney said: ‘She fears the defendant will become angry when served with these papers; that he will harass and/or physically harm her, especially if he has been drinking alcoholic beverages, as he has done in the past.’

Those words, ‘as he has done in the past’, form the first-known mention of Lynne going further than saying that her husband was merely an alcoholic. Here she was, telling a court that Jamie had harassed and/or harmed her previously. She was also making it clear that she sought the court’s protection and Lou Sherman sought a temporary restraining order.

The use of restraining orders would become something Jamie would utilise to protect Britney in later life but back in 1980, his own wife sought to exercise those same powers against him. Indeed, if this was the extent of Jamie’s temper, it might go some way to explaining some of Britney’s reported reluctance at him being installed as her conservator in 2008.

Lynne was loath to leave Jamie because she dearly loved him and she’d been vehemently opposed to divorce, living in a less nonchalant era when the very idea was frowned upon within a Baptist community. So the fact she actively sought a decree nisi illustrates how desperate she had become. Her friends have suggested it was an overreaction in the red mist of betrayal but in that January of 1980, it could not have seemed more final. She sought a custody order over Bryan; $200-a-month child support and $400-a-month alimony; and declared to the courts an intention to find her own place. Jamie was ordered to attend a hearing on 1 February to explain himself and state his case.

For Lynne, this sad episode marked the end of the fairytale in which she’d described their union as ‘the Barbie and Ken of Kentwood’.

It was a fairytale that began in the spring of 1976. Lynne’s maiden name was Bridges and she was a 20-year-old student at a community college renamed Southeastern Louisiana University in nearby Hammond. She was an education major who met Jamie Spears, 23, at a local swimming pool in July 1976, after skipping summer school. He was relaxing from his ‘tough-ass job’ as a boiler-maker—a trained craftsman who fits, welds and constructs steel plates and sections on projects as diverse as bridges to blast furnaces. By then, he was used to going where the contracts were: from Louisiana to New York, Missouri to Memphis.

Spears was considered as quite a catch by the ladies: it wasn’t just that he was regarded as ‘high, wide and handsome’, he was renowned for being one of the region’s finest athletes, basketball and football players; the all-round sportsman whose abilities are still remembered to this day.

‘He could shoot the basket with one step over the centre-line, let alone the shooting zone. Let me tell you, when you’ve got black basketball players complimenting the skills of a white basketball player, then you’re somebody special—and Jamie was that man. He was also a mean quarterback. That big son-of-a-bitch would have had some career if someone had punched him between the eyes and made him focus,’ said one ex-peer, who believes, ‘the reason for Jamie’s ultimate downfall was Jamie himself’.

Another friend who has known Jamie since schooldays said: ‘He should have made the big-time. He was one of Kentwood’s finest but could have been much more.’

Lynne was smitten, swept off her feet by either the man or her romantic ideals. However, the same could not be said for her parents, Barney and Lillian Bridges, because they knew what everyone else knew: Jamie had been married before. In Baptist Kentwood, getting together with a once-married man could bring a shame that was community-sent. But local archives prove it was much more complicated than a blotted copybook, and ‘Mr Barney and Miss Lillian’ could be justified for harbouring real concerns for their daughter’s welfare.

Lynne has since described her husband’s first marriage as ‘a brief union that was over almost before it began’ but Jamie married a ‘real beautiful’ woman called Debra Sanders in December 1972 and it lasted a good three years. Jamie was said to be head-over-heels in love, but he inexplicably upped and left on 10 May 1975, according to legal papers served by Debra. She claimed he ‘abandoned’ her despite the fact she’d been ‘a faithful wife, given her husband no cause for mistreating her and always tried to make him happy’ He denied abandoning her. Friends say he felt ‘suffocated’.

One year later, with reconciliation unlikely, Debra sought to terminate their marriage. It is interesting to note that Jamie denied all her allegations and said that he ‘pray[ed] that the demand of the plaintiff be rejected.’ He submitted his denials to the courts on 14 July 1976 but the following day, the divorce was granted.

Fifteen days later, on 29 July, Jamie Spears married Lynne Bridges.

On the evidence of these concrete dates, they met, dated and married within the space of two weeks. The only other possibility is that they met while Jamie was still technically married but that was surely never the case in their Baptist community. Whichever way it is viewed, this headlong rush into a union will have been frowned on regardless.

No wonder the Bridges were alarmed. They always felt their daughter could do better, not to mention the fact that she was in the middle of her studies, with one year left at college. The family were ‘good stock’ and ‘Miss Lillian’ felt her daughters Sandra and Lynne deserved quintessential gentlemen who knew how to treat a lady.

Sandra’s husband Reggie, a financial wizard who went into banking, won their approval. Jamie, the once-married boilermaker, did not. He was known in the community for his ‘crazy’ ways; the work hard, play hard type, and it is highly unlikely the Spears’ and Bridges’ clans would ever have sat down to dinner together. It was the combination of chalk and fine cheese as far as Kentwood was concerned.

That might explain why Lynne chose to elope to New York and marry in Oswego, where Jamie was working a short-term contract. She sacrificed her fantasy of a fairytale wedding for a quick registration formality, without parental consent. In an action that Britney would copy in later life, she was defiant and rebellious. Nothing would come between her and her man.

In her mind, she was being responsible, choosing to be a mother and set up home with the local hero who, in her eyes, was capable and solid.

Nine months later, their only son Bryan was born.

Lynne was a mum aged 21, and couldn’t have been happier. But the arrival of their first child triggered something within Jamie and his capable mask began to slip.

All boilermakers will tell you that the unforgiving work and hours in intense heat require the reward of a cold beer to unwind afterwards. But Jamie’s cold beers turned into drinking binges. He often staggered home with a tongue poisoned by alcohol to belittle and berate Lynne. His slurred insults and frightening temper chipped away at his wife’s confidence as he criticised her efforts around the home and mocked her intention to finish the studies interrupted by Bryan’s birth. Then, in the mornings, he’d sober up and tell Lynne he couldn’t live without her. He would change, he promised; he would quit, he insisted. Lynne, demonstrating the classic response of a co-dependant, believed him.

Her need to retain this man in her life was no doubt aided and abetted by the grief she experienced over the loss of her father, two years into the marriage. Barney Bridges was killed on the family dairy farm when his milk truck rolled over. It crushed him as he attempted to jump to safety. Jamie’s response to the tragedy was to disappear for a week. But even then, and understandably, Lynne didn’t have the will or strength to let go of the only other man in her life. Grief conspired to pin her to the spot, despite the protests of her sister and mama.

She soldiered on as a mother and student, finally completing her education diploma in 1979, leaving Bryan with his widowed grandma by day, but it was obvious to everyone that she was living in an intolerable set-up. Lynne covered up and excused her husband’s behaviour. Her big heart misguided her into thinking that compassion was enough to save him but she was as much in denial over the truth as Jamie was about his drinking. Lynne felt a need to take care of her husband more than she wished to take care of herself, thereby drawing her into his web of addiction.

Then came the Christmas of 1979, and the adultery cited by Lynne.

After taking refuge with her mama, she seemed determined to make a fresh start going into 1980. For two weeks, she stood her ground and then took Jamie back. This meant he didn’t need to appear in court to respond to her divorce petition and it was officially withdrawn on 26 March 1980. It was a legal irony that the attorney’s daughter Jody Sherman went on to marry Jamie’s brother Austin, ten years later.

Such is life in the small town of Kentwood.

Under their marital reconciliation, Lynne found it hard to contemplate turning over a new leaf in the trailer-home where the hurtful tryst apparently happened. Jamie had eyed some land further down the road from Simpson’s Trailer Park, locating a property in need of improvement behind Greenlaw Baptist Church. By July 1980, no doubt flushed with his good earnings from short-term contract work, the young couple took out their first mortgage on the bungalow and an extra plot of adjoining land for a total of $34,750, putting down $18,580 in cash. This is the property that would become Britney’s childhood home.

Lynne describes those first twelve months back together as ‘a year of peace’, and she happily fell pregnant with Britney. A new start and a new addition to the family became the redeeming factors in rebuilding the marriage, but it seemed hardly a stable set-up to those who looked on with concern. The emotional wounds caused by Jamie’s infidelity can hardly have healed in twelve months; in fact, Lynne’s suspicions were never slayed. Inevitably, from the moment Britney arrived in the world, she had an expectation unwittingly heaped on her shoulders.

Britney the Saviour had been born…Born to save her parents’ marriage.

Britney was born into a loaded situation. From the moment she was conceived, she was charged with the unconscious purpose of saving the marriage. She was not entering a healthy environment; she was entering a fragile truce. Whatever the underlying reasoning, this marriage’s hopes of happiness rested on Britney’s shoulders. That unwittingly placed on her an agenda no one will have been aware of, but one that will have left its load imprinted on her psyche. ‘Britney is here…this time things will be different!’ was a hope projected onto her.

It’s sometimes hard for the layperson to take in, but a baby picks up messages and detects every experience through the mother’s own psyche, heartbeat and nervous system, and all that information is imprinted. Even during pregnancy, Britney will have ‘felt’ whatever anxieties Lynne faced. Was she right to give Jamie another chance? Would he keep his word? Would he be the father she needed him to be? Would he start drinking again? So when she’s born, she’s automatically at one with Mum, tuned into her anxieties. This would explain their intense bond. This inherent anxiousness would go a long way to explaining much of the nervous energy Britney exhibited, and the anxiety she would carry throughout life.

The family would mostly be unaware of these factors. Unconscious influences are responsible for many human actions and behaviours, though.

Britney has always said her childhood memories make her such a ‘family person’. She once wrote on her website that she remembered watching movies with her family and ‘feeling so at peace’. At other times, she has recalled her father’s crawfish boil parties—Louisiana’s equivalent of a barbecue—and her mama’s specialities: chicken spaghetti and homemade ice cream. For breakfast, it would always be a southern favourite, cheese grits—‘breakfast for champions’, according to Jamie. It would be inaccurate to suggest this was a continually unhappy childhood; clearly it was not. For Britney, this domestic environment represented the norm and undoubtedly she would have cherished those times when Jamie was present, loving and attentive, together with Lynne.

Indeed, Jamie was determined to embrace his second chance with Lynne, keen to be a better father and husband.

Friends of Jamie Spears describe him as ‘a man with a big heart, a good soul but a stronger liver’. One lifelong friend in Kentwood, who wishes to remain nameless, jumps to his defence and says: ‘If that man gets the chance to put things right when he’s screwed up, he’ll do all in his power to make amends. He’ll do it to prove it to himself, to prove it to God and to prove others wrong. Whether he succeeds or fails, he gives his best.’

The general consensus is that Jamie is a ‘stubborn son-of-a-bitch’ with flaws he’s all too aware of, but this ‘does not make him mean-spirited by nature’. The distinction drawn is that between the great guy who is sober, and the crazy guy when drunk. Back in 1981, Jamie focussed on being that great guy.

There is a saying in Kentwood—‘Getting Right With God’—and Jamie repented of his sins, rededicated himself to God and undertook voluntary work at the family church. Prior to Britney’s birth, he decided half his problems were caused by the stresses of work that took him away from home. So, with the money that work had earned, and after moving into the new family home, he and Lynne decided to build and open what she has referred to a ‘health spa’. It sounds impressive, conveying images of a Champneys of the eighties. In actuality, it was a large barn with a metal-structured extension at one end, built on a plot of land adjacent to their home. Called ‘Total Fitness by Jamie’, the sign, in white lettering, was nailed to the double doors. To help fund this venture, they took out a further mortgage for $50,000 in 1981 and, suddenly, Kentwood had a gym with the latest running and weight machinery, a hot-tub and a steam-room. In truth, it was more gym than health-spa.

Nevertheless, it represented a brave move at a time when the concept of healthy living and wellbeing was in its embryonic stages, but Jamie had a vision. His life-long friend comments: ‘Jamie worked out, and was entering and winning bodybuilding contests. The man was built like a house and he thought he could turn his business into the next Gold’s Gym.’

For $300 a month, locals had somewhere to work out and, at one time, the venue attracted around 120 members. Initially, all seemed well but much as Jamie felt ready to meet his new responsibilities, he simply wasn’t capable of doing so. Alcoholism’s demons proved too strong to conquer alone and soon he was drinking again. As with Bryan, Britney’s birth seemed to trigger this return to the bottle. Twice he had been ready to be a father, and twice that joyous event had sent him over the edge.

From this moment on, son and daughter witnessed regular slanging matches between their parents. Tensions were not helped when brothers Austin and Willie Spears moved in for a spell, sleeping in a treehouse that Jamie had built for the kids.

Jamie’s friend has commented that sometimes it got ‘nasty’ between Jamie and Lynne: ‘They were always at each other’s throats, fighting like mountain lions. ‘Course it was traumatic for the children; it had to be.’

In the family, Jamie earned the nickname ‘Captain Red-Ass’ because of his temper: ‘He was the sweetest man and good as gold one minute but once you’ve pressed the wrong button, you best run and hide—and Lynne knew how to press the wrong buttons,’ said Britney’s Aunty Chanda. She witnessed many storms pass through the Spears’ household because, for a two-year spell, she lived with her husband John Mark, Jamie’s brother, in a trailer on land near the house. Her observations are worrying and instantaneously remove the perfect-family image promoted when Britney first shot to stardom. The truth is that what Britney witnessed will have been deeply traumatic for a child.

When the fights happened, Britney sought refuge in Chanda’s trailer. Her aunt paints a picture of a sweet, but timid girl—it seems an environment of constant hollering and verbal abuse rendered Britney quiet and withdrawn; that’s until she had to perform.

Aunty Chanda said: ‘She stayed with us quite a bit to get away from Jamie’s drinking. It scared her. Jamie and Lynne would fight about anything and everything, and the same pattern would happen: she’d take off to her sister’s or mama’s, come back, Jamie would quit drinking but then he’d start again.’

One night Aunty Chanda vividly remembers is when Britney’s brother Bryan was sleeping over at the trailer with two friends. Jamie and Lynne’s place was already full because Austin Spears was temporarily staying over. The next thing Chanda knew was a rapid knocking on her trailer door—and there was Lynne, sobbing: Apparently, Jamie came in after drinking, shouting and screaming at her. Austin stuck up for Lynne, and then him and Jamie started fighting. Lynne then took off and came to our house.’

Chanda McGovern points out that these were not sporadic incidents. Far from a blessed home, the domestic situation seemed blighted by the self-hate of an alcoholic’s love for drink and the reactionary dramas of his co-dependent wife. In the middle ground stood Bryan and Britney. Now it becomes clearer why Britney often escaped to her bedroom and the bathroom to dream of faraway places. ‘All the kids would cling to Lynne, and I can see them now, wrapped around her or clinging to her legs. As long as they stuck close to their mama, they felt safe,’ Chanda recalls.

To exacerbate matters, Jamie neglected the gym business and bills went unpaid. The situation reached a point where Lynne had to beg and borrow money from friends to keep afloat. It didn’t help that Jamie was playing poker. Kent-wood folklore states that one night, when a millionaire was in town, Jamie ‘skinned’ him for £3,000. This went down as the occasion when the boilermaker chased the rich man’s ass out of town. But often, Jamie lost, and he lost heavily and then drank heavily to make up for it. His usual bar crawl involved visits to many bars that no longer exist: The Uptown Lounge, Baby Tate’s, The Foxes Den, Tic-Tok and The Mulberry Bush.

The full extent of the Spears’ poverty has never fully come across, but things became so bad that Britney would go to the fridge and find it bare. This wasn’t just a family with money troubles. They were broke and often financially desperate. Britney has since told friends that ‘people don’t realise how broke we were’. It reached the point where Jamie had to wander into the woods behind the home and hunt food for dinner. On occasion, as Britney herself has revealed, that meant eating rabbit and squirrel. Against such desperation, tensions were understandably heightened. Britney’s Uncle Willie—Jamie’s brother—bore witness to some ugly incidents, including once at a family crawfish boil.

‘Jamie was drunk and then tried to drive off with Britney in the car. She was no more than five years old. I tried to stop him, so I reached into the truck to grab the keys from the ignition and he punched me. We got right into it there by the car, fighting in front of her. Britney was jumping up and down, crying. Lynne had to run out to get her inside. We Spears men are known for fighting. If Britney happened to be there, so be it. It’s sad but it’s what happened,’ he said. The true sadness is that no one realised what it was doing to the children:

If Mum is distracted by an on-going battle with her husband, can you imagine how that focus on Jamie, and all that time and energy spent fighting, will have affected the attachment with Britney? When both parents are 100 per cent committed and engaged with the upbringing of their children, a sense of value and strong sense of self is allowed to grow. But when the dad is emotionally and physically distant, and when the mother is the co-dependant consumed by his same troubles, it makes it tremendously hard for either of them to be 100 per cent present for the children, however much they think they are. As Britney matures, she will have especially asked herself of Lynne: ‘Why did you put us through such misery?’ or ‘What made you so blind?’ or ‘Why weren’t you stronger?’ The truth is that Lynne probably struggled being on her own and was emotionally invested in a fantasy, trying to keep together the family she’d always envisioned. Back then, the deeper ramifications will not have been apparent to Lynne. She and Jamie were too immature to understand the wider implications of their behaviour.

If there was one person aside from Aunty Chanda that Britney could count on amid the chaos, it was another aunty, Sandra Covington: Lynne’s sister and mother of cousin Laura-Lynn. Aunty Sandra was a second mother and true rock.

Throughout the mayhem of Jamie’s alcoholism, and his daughter’s world fame in later years, Sandra was the safe and wise harbour where both Britney and Lynne found strength and eternal support. She was the lynchpin within the family, and her role and importance in Britney’s life cannot be over-estimated. Whenever Britney returned home when she became famous, her first stop was always Aunty Sandra’s house. But she was as powerless as everyone else to do anything about Jamie’s alcoholism. Inevitably, the family home—with Bryan and Britney at its centre—became an energetic field of pain, rage, and anxiety, all competing against the genuine love the parents had for their children.

Two undisciplined adults attempted to be parents within a self-created emotional chaos that enjoyed small windows of sobriety and calm. Lynne, by her own admission, lived on her wits end in a vortex of uncertainty and insecurity. Yet the enabler she became tried in vain to manage Jamie’s alcohol intake, allowing him to drink only beer, not spirits, or suggesting days when it would be okay to drink. Many a night, when he was still out, she cried herself to sleep, worried whether he was with another woman, still plagued by his deceit of 1979.

Bryan and Britney witnessed everything: Dad’s hollering, and Mama sat crumpled on the kitchen floor; Dad begging for forgiveness at her feet and Mama giving him yet another second chance. Such evident disorder and anxiety would have been transmitted into the very fibre of Britney’s being as an impressionable girl who, together with Bryan, witnessed the example set by her two chief role models.

Jamie’s brother Willie has also recalled a time when Britney called him to fetch her. ‘She said, “They’re fighting again—please come get me.” It was rough, but the sad thing is that it became normal life. Once, I was over at the house and Jamie walked in drunk and called Lynne a bad name. She was in the kitchen drinking water and he grabbed the glass, walked into the lounge and just hurled it. At first, Britney was a scared child and you’d catch her crying but she reached the stage when she just walked off, as if it wasn’t happening. As she got older, she would scream and curse at her parents, trying to get them to stop fighting.’

Considering the non-disciplined environment in which Britney was raised, this allows us to make better sense of the out-of-control self-destruction that she, too, would exhibit in adulthood. It also casts light on the present conservatorship where the contrasts are painfully ironic: the man who set an out-of-control example to his daughter and handed down the worst possible lesson in discipline is now the same man exercising control over every aspect of Britney’s life, expecting her to show discipline.

But one thing is also certain: it is Jamie’s own realizations about the father he was, and the mistakes he made, that are now driving him to make amends. His friends are unanimous: he is trying to save Britney from the same ‘craziness’ that marred his own life; he doesn’t want her making the same mistakes that he made in his twenties. For him, the conservatorship grants a second chance to be a good father, and Britney one last chance to bring order to her life.

No one is more aware than Jamie and Lynne that all their children should have been spared such distress. With the wisdom of their years and the benefit of hindsight, in her memoir Lynne accepts that they fought too much in front of the kids and failed to contain the volatility of their relationship. She knows she should have dealt with such matters behind closed doors. Perhaps what she hasn’t realized is that the long-term effects on Britney are untold:

When a child is caught in the middle of such rage and volatility, that child feels abject terror, and constant anxiety. It would have left Britney with a sense of always living on the edge, always zinging her nervous system. From within this unman-aged set-up the parents act erratically, impulsively and recklessly with one another. And this is the lesson handed down to the child. Such traumatic domestic environments don’t feel safe to a child and they often emerge from the chaos as impulsive individuals with little concept of consequences, suffering from low self-esteem, great anxiety and trust issues. Also, the child’s loss of respect for its parents, and the later resentments it can cause, cannot be over-estimated.

From all the domestic chaos an angelic little Britney would rise from the dust-cloud; the performer whose singing and dancing provided the one happy respite. From an early age, she would have felt the positive impact she brought—when she performed, her parents stopped fighting. Daddy was proud and her mama looked happy, no longer crying.

Through Britney, through her performing, this family found highs, triumphs and a distraction that they couldn’t find on their own. Britney had found a way of stopping the rows that were disturbing, bringing everyone else out of their craziness and into a place of agreement. Performance became the answer, and she became the spark plug to light up the family with her talent—and her hope. So, instead of having an authority figure she could lookup to, Britney’s talents became the one thing that shone. As for Britney, as she asks, ‘Who can I look up to in all of this?’ She would have had to look outside the family and look to God, Madonna, a relative or a teacher.

Within this environment, it becomes clear that Lynne wasn’t so much pushing Britney’s talents but viewing them as an outlet for happiness; almost living vicariously through her daughter. A constant treadmill of dance recitals, gymnastic classes, vocal lessons and talent contests—and ultimately The Mickey Mouse Club—removed both mother and daughter from a house regularly filled with trauma, distress and tears. Little wonder Britney’s blossoming potential preoccupied Lynne because her romantic notions of family life were going in the same direction as her mama’s.

As for Britney she discovered that performing was her sole coping mechanism to shut out the quiet pain she must have felt. It was in her self-made bubbles that her persona as a singer and dancer was developed as a defence against the anxiety inside the home:

If mum and dad’s life was so out of control, how could any child feel secure within that environment? So performing became Britney’s one reliable source of pleasure and coping strategy. When she was in the ‘performance’, she felt free and safe; it provided a place which allowed her to disconnect from her reality. Consequently, to this day, performing will be her go-to place to which she can connect, avoid pain and find freedom. But in adulthood, in a mirror to her childhood, when she steps out of performance-mode, she’s in disarray and confusion, and feels lost. Flash forward to 2007, and what shocked the world was that when Britney’s façade fell away, she could no longer hide in a performance, or hide how out-of-control she really was on the inside. And we can trace that back to an out-of-control home.

It would be easy for people to pin the blame at Jamie Spears’ door, and judge him based on the raw evidence of his alcoholism. But few hit the bottle for fun, and there’s almost always an underlying trauma that causes the addict to find an anaesthetic to suppress their own pain. Often, the root cause is some kind of trauma that the person has never found a way to come to terms with.

In her memoir, Lynne wrote how people asked, ‘if there was some sort of trigger, a traumatic event’ that pushed Jamie into drinking. ‘The answer is no,’ she said, referring to the duration of their marriage. On the surface, nothing was readily obvious. But it’s accurate to say that each time he was ‘dry’, his return to drinking coincided with the births of Bryan and Britney. Fatherhood triggered something. And it is there, in his distant past, the most likely trigger-point can be found in a traumatic event that would break him as an individual and ultimately shape the world Britney was born into.

The 31-year-old woman had selected her perfect spot to die.

She had left the family home and driven to a cemetery three miles east of Kentwood. She parked her car before walking between the different burial plots, stopping at the graveside of a baby boy who had lived only three short days. Calmly, this mother-of-four sat down and rested against the small gravestone before removing her right shoe, revealing a bare foot. She splayed out her left leg across the grave and then checked the 12-bore shotgun was ready and loaded with a single shell. Satisfied and sure, she turned the gun inward, pressed it against her chest and pointed the barrel’s end to the heart.

Then, using the big toe of her right foot, she pulled the trigger.

Emma Jean Spears—Jamie’s mum and the grandma Britney would never know—had long imagined and planned this suicide. It was shortly before 4pm on 29 May 1966, the baking sun was out and she’d simply wanted the pain to end, having never come to terms with the loss of her baby son, Austin Wayne, nine years earlier in March 1957.

She had fought depression ever since, while trying to maintain a home for her three other sons and a daughter, and her husband, a former juvenile officer with the Baton Rouge Police Department. Britney’s grandfather, Austin Spears Sr, told the local coroner that his wife grieved the loss of their son and had attempted suicide on three previous occasions.

The suicide made the front-page of the 10-cents-a-copy Kentwood News on 2 June 1966 under the headline: ‘Find Body at Grave of Infant Son’. No one in the community understood how Emma Jean could take her life to be with the three-day-old baby boy she’d lost, leaving her four other living children, including Jamie, then aged fourteen, without a mother.

Although the tragedy took place fifteen years before Britney was born, it provides an insight into the man and father Jamie would become. In finding compassion for him within this event, there is opportunity to understand why he was so incapable of being a loving father and husband, no matter how much he wanted to be.

Can you imagine how broken Jamie must have felt? The sense of worthlessness and rejection is beyond ordinary comprehension. We don’t know how close he was to his mother, but her leaving him in these circumstances would be a significant trauma. How could he not take such an event personally?

Pure, healthy maternal love is ordinarily the most important love from the primary caretaker, but his mother’s love abandoned him. So his auto-response was likely to be: ‘If Mum can leave me like that, what does that say about me?’ It sends a misleading message that he’s not loveable and not worthy, and becomes a source of great pain. Not only that, but if his mother was depressed for the nine years since her baby’s death, she may have been emotionally and physically distant from the time he was six: as Jamie was emotionally and physically distant with Britney. Is this the reason why?

When a trauma like this happens, then future relationships can be affected because Jamie associates love with this trauma. Being attached to a woman could make him fear loss again; that if his mother could drop out of his life, so could his wife. This would leave him in a perpetual state of anxiety. The births of both Bryan and Britney trigger the memory of the birth of the brother who died—the event that led to his mother’s suicide. He’ll therefore equate birth with death, and this is what most likely tips him over the edge. In many respects, his responses were borne out of an intense fear of losing Lynne and his children. It wasn’t the absence of love that meant he couldn’t show up as a father or husband; it was the presence of immense pain. His behaviour, therefore, requires compassion because it was an addiction with its roots in a tragedy that wreaked havoc within him.

For a good time after the birth of their third child, Jamie-Lynn, Jamie was ‘dry’. His exertions were applied to the gym. It was also here that Britney would wander in. Men in mid-work out, pumping iron to the sound of country music, still remember her switching the music to pop, dancing on a mat. Members objected but Jamie smiled, letting her be. As for the piece and quiet of the steam room, men would be sitting in their swimming trunks when Britney entered in her bikini. One ex-member recalled: ‘She knew how to empty that room! She was doing vocal coaching at the time so she’d screech opera notes. It was like listening to someone gurgling water!’

Jamie’s friends believe he deserves compassion, not judgement. When he drank, there was no stopping him but his sacrifices for the good were, they say, equal to his flaws. His life-long friend said: ‘It all started going wrong again when Lynne and Britney went to Orlando. He backed it all the way but he was left alone and became frustrated. Instead, he occupied himself with nights out in Hammond with a bunch of 2 5-year-olds. That man worked damn hard but never had a grip on his life.’

Jamie Spears lets few people close to him. He is a strong, impenetrable southern man. But one acquaintance, who knows him from LA, believes the focus on his alcoholism—as first detailed in Lynne’s memoir—blights the truth of his love for Britney: ‘No-one more than Jamie knows that he messed up, but he believes God gives people second chances. He’s a decent, stand-up guy who refuses to deal in bad business and he doesn’t really care what people think about him. He’s faced tougher battles than contending with people’s opinions.’

According to this friend, Jamie’s home is a shrine to his daughter with her childhood photos reflecting a father’s pride, and perhaps a regret for times lost: ‘You want to see how his face lights up when he speaks about her. He’d spend all day showing you photos, if he could. His favourite memories are the vacations taken in Tennessee. When his mind goes back there, he has a massive grin on his face, and I’ve seen tears well in those eyes of his. He can’t put back what’s gone, but he can make amends.’

The Spears’ family photo albums, and the recollections found within two books by mum and daughter—Heart to Heart and A Mother’s Gift—bury the pain of Britney’s childhood. They were published to run parallel with brand Britney, assisting the Stepford perfect image that was constructed.

When the cracks did show in 2007, and Britney imploded Lynne Spears was already writing a book on her own: Through The Storm. In total, she has co-written two books with Britney, and one on her own, no doubt making her the only mother in showbusiness to pen a memoir before the star herself. It is therefore hard not to draw the conclusion that Lynne is incapable of withdrawing into the shadows.

Perhaps when Britney’s fame turned sour, Lynne felt the need to set the record straight, no doubt in response to a collective media question that asked: ‘Where are the parents in all this?’ Indeed, her memoir provides many rebuttals to the myths she wished to slay.

One such ‘myth’ is that she was the archetypal stage-mom, who pushed Britney into the spotlight. In this regard, she can rightly feel aggrieved. Britney’s ‘performing’ and talents were self-created. Lynne was simply the mother who decided to trust the direction her daughter wanted to go, and hang onto the magic carpet.

But Lynne was always overly keen to publicly celebrate her special mother-daughter relationship. A showy declaration of a mother’s love and pride is not only contained within the pages of three books, it was the very subtext behind Britney’s childhood; a mother who lit up in the light and attention reflected off her daughter’s talents. And this satisfaction would have filled the hole left by her disintegrating marriage.

What Lynne didn’t feel as a wife, she felt as a mother. By her own admission, she says motherhood kept her sane. Her children were her salvation, reinforcing the burden unwittingly placed on young shoulders, and especially Britney’s.

It’s almost as if Lynne felt it was her purpose to find success for her daughter because she felt she’d failed in her own life. Britney was the hope amid the hopelessness. But the danger is that Lynne may have recognised Britney the performer, not Britney the child—her real self. Lynne, quite rightly, would say that she absolutely adored her daughter, provided all the love In the world and raised her correctly. That Is not In doubt. What we are referring to here Is the unconscious elements found In the undercurrents and the emphasis Lynne placed on Britney as a performer.

If the approval, the applause, and ‘look everybody’ attitude Is what greeted Britney’s talents, then that’s the only value Britney will have associated with—the value of being ‘seen’ as the performer. Britney will have noted the sparkle In Mum’s eyes and that would have been the validation she’d sought. In Britney’s mind, performing provides an Illusion that solves everything: It makes her feel stable and makes people around her happy. In turn, all this brings love, praise and hugs. But that mind-set actually becomes a burden because It turns Britney Into a performing doll, performing to keep peace and happiness, as an antidote to the chaos.

The problem Is this: Jamie and Lynne had no Idea who they were as people and so cannot pass down any sense of self, or what that means, to Britney. One of the big ways we all form a sense of self Is through mirroring our environment. Accordingly, she Is being taught to Identify with being a performer and builds a false sense of self. But what Is home and who Is she when not performing? This will be the source of Britney’s confusion and the cause of great anxiety.

Lynne, too, will have realised that she felt good about herself for the first time in ages.

The unmet needs of an adult relationship can lead to a parent going to the child to receive those needs, and that child then feels responsible for those needs. There was almost an unconscious trade-off between Britney and Lynne. The vibe between both of them was, ‘When I’m with you, I feel better’. Britney had another unconscious agenda placed on her—as the source of pleasure, and this further strengthened the development of a performer’s persona. Mum placed her on a pedestal in her own mind, and within the community. I would simply ask, ‘What other aspect of Britney was developed and encouraged away from the performer and her talents?’

Propelled by so many invisible forces, and the personal dream she held, the young girl with the cheesy smile and bright innocence was destined to push beyond Louisiana’s borders. Something always whispered to Britney that her destiny belonged somewhere other than Kentwood. What no one could know was that Mickey Mouse was soon to extend a hand that would pull her to the next level, away from the disorder and towards ‘stardom’.