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.