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.