Britney: Inside the Dream

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 This meant he didn’t need to appear in court to respond to her divorce petition and it was officially withdrawn on 26 March 1980.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.