That Spears Family Is Even More Screwed Up Than We Thought...

I always though that Britney's craziness was just the result of too much fame too soon in her life, too much alcohol, drug abuse and the fact that while she was growing up, no one basically had any kind of control over her and no one ever imposed any clear limits as to what she can and can't do. But I guess I was wrong - yes, it's been known to happen. I should have taken into account the fact that yes, family is also important. And no, I'm not talking about that kind of family that we see posing for perfect pictures in glossy magazines - I'm talking about the years in which Britney grew up with her real family, before she became the perfectly engineered teen with the perfect smile and the perfect boyfriend and the perfect "I'm not having sex before I'm married" philosophy.

And her family life couldn't have been that perfect, because of its apparent failure to instill even the slightest amount of common sense into the present day Brit Brit, with her two failed marriages, her custody drama and her overall crazy behavior, that's sometimes funny, sometimes tragic and sometimes downright absurd. I'm sorry to go all philosophical on you now - so back to my original point: the Spears' picture-perfect family life, which - with one daughter the butt of all tabloid jokes and the other pregnant at 16 and selling her story to a magazine for a cold hard $1 million pay-off - definitely ISN'T that perfect.

I'm just preparing you for the absolute craziness that will follow in the next months. I mean, I never imagined I was going to say this too soon - but I don't know which of the Spears sisters really makes me sad the most. Britney with her crazy antics and silly determination to ignore any form of authority in this life, or her sister who is 10 years younger and already whoring out her unborn baby and willingly making herself part of the media circus that's partly responsible for destroying her older sister.

So yes, let's say there's plenty of room for interpretation, and I'm sure we could make the Spears family the topic of a psychology (or even psychiatry) treatise - the cold, hard facts are that we (and by "we" I also mean millions of teenagers around the world) will witness the sad circus show that will follow: Jamie Lynn's pregnancy, the photos, the interviews - we know the drill already. The only difference is that twice around the same block, things suddenly seem to become a lot less funny. We could even go as far as to call them tragic.