Sometimes the only way to say ‘mother, I’m afraid I’ve been having it off with a rough chap from church and now I’m bally well pregnant’ is in a letter.
And sometimes the only way to sell copies of your memoir about what a slapdash job you appear to have done of raising your children is to discuss that highly private letter on live TV.
Lynne Spears knows that only too well, because she’s been pimping her new book Britney Spears: My Part In Her Downfall by telling the Today show about the hilarious time that Jamie Lynn Spears was so eaten up by the crippling shame of her teenage pregnancy that she couldn’t even tell Lynne about it face to face and had to write a note instead – a note which left Lynne Spears weeping with uncontrollable anguish and the stark realisation that she’d unquestionably failed as a mother. Good times.
It’s always nice to see people learn from their mistakes, isn’t it? Take Lynne Spears, for example. She’s made her mistakes in the past – like the time she pushed her two kids into showbusiness from an exceptionally young age at the cost of their childhood just so that she could piggyback on their fame – but you won’t see her doing anything like that again.
No sir. It may have taken one horrifying mental breakdown and a teenage pregnancy to work that out, but it doesn’t matter, because Lynne Spears will never exploit her childrens’ fame again – so much so that she’s started doing television appearances to promote her book about never exploiting her childrens’ fame again.
Lynne Spears’ book Britney Spears: A Warning From History has already made the headlines for the way that it reveals how Britney Spears lost her viginity as a child. But, worried that she might be giving a false impression that Britney is her only car-crash offspring, Lynne Spears has gone on TV to explain what a monstrous little brat Jamie Lynn Spears is as well.
Oh, we’re only kidding. It’s unfair to call Jamie Lynn Spears a monstrous little brat just because she got knocked up while she was still at school. But it’s totally cool to imply that she is by suggesting that she was too cowardly to verbally admit her pregnancy to her mother and had to resort to a scrawled note instead. So we’ll do that.
After all, it’s what Lynne Spears sort of did herself on the Today show yesterday. She said:
“I thought it was a joke… I kept waiting for the punch line. I was just truly in shock and then I started to cry. And then she started consoling me at that point.”
Actually, what Lynne Spears doesn’t understand is that it actually was just a joke. Jamie Lynn Spears – notorious prankster that she is – had in fact written the following on the back of the note:
“Punk’d! I totally just punk’d you mom. Of course I’d never get pregnant! I’m only 16 and wouldn’t dream of having sex, especially with this stupid-faced idiot. I mean, look at him. He looks like the product of decades of institutionalised incest. This couldn’t possibly be anything but a ridiculous joke.”
However, Lynne Spears took the news so badly with all the tears and the self-blame that Jamie Lynn Spears decided that, rather than admit to the joke and confuse her mother any further, she’d go and immediately get pregnant anyway, even though it’d ruin the rest of her life.
Oh Lynne Spears, if only you’d have turned the note over, life would have been so very different. Mostly in that we wouldn’t have had to keep writing about your sodding book all the bloody time.