Britney Spears is releasing her highly anticipated tell-all memoir, “The Woman In Me,” this week. In it, she discusses the struggles of her 13-year conservatorship under her father, Jamie Spears, revealing that she “went along” with it for “one very good reason,” her children.
In her new memoir, “The Woman In Me,” Britney Spears revealed that she “went along” with her court-ordered conservatorship under her father, Jamie Spears, for 13 years for “one very good reason.”
“I did it for my kids,” she wrote, according to CBS. Spears has two kids with ex-husband Kevin Federline: Jayden and Sean Preston. In 2007, the singer temporarily lost custody of her sons after she divorced Federline and struggled with her own mental health. Shortly after, in 2008, her father took control of her personal life and finances after being placed under a conservatorship by a California judge.
“Because I played by the rules, I was reunited with my boys,” Spears wrote, going on to explain how the conservatorship controlled every single aspect of her life, including her diet, career, birth control methods, etc.
“Even though I begged the court to appoint literally anyone else – and I mean, anyone off the street would have been better – my father was given the job [of conservator].”
Spears goes on to discuss her excitement looking towards the future with her newfound freedom. Two years ago a judge granted Spears approval for her request to be released from her conservatorship amid a lengthy legal battle and social pressure from her fans who created the “#FreeBritney” movement.
“Freedom means being goofy, silly, and having fun on social media. … Freedom means being able to make mistakes, and learning from them. Freedom means I don’t have to perform for anyone — onstage or offstage. Freedom means that I get to be as beautifully imperfect as everyone else. And freedom means the ability, and the right, to search for joy, in my own way, on my own terms,” she wrote.
Spears went on to discuss how she struggled with postpartum depression from both of her births which were within two years of each other: 2005 and 2006. The following year, 2007, paparazzi were paying large amounts of money for any picture of Spears holding her kids, and would go on to publish headlines calling her an unfit mother.
“Unfortunately, there wasn’t the same conversation about mental health back then that there is now. I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early. … Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue.”
Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist who specializes in women’s mental health, told CBS News that the guilt that comes with postpartum depression is in the “context of what it means to be a mother, what it means to be a woman, what it means to have trouble connecting to something you’re supposed to be so, so connected to, and I think it just would be compounded with people saying negative things about you and not knowing how to process that because your brain is already negative.”
Spears also wrote about how she made headlines in 2007 for shaving her head in an “act of defiance.”
“I was cornered. I was out being chased, like always, by these men waiting for me to do something they could photograph,” Spears writes. “And so that night I gave them some material… Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: F*** you.”
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
