In answer to recent email

Many of you have written to ask what I think about what is going on with Britney Spears, and I have to say that some of the emails have been a bit nicer to her than others. Normally I would try to find some bit of humor in what seems to be happening, but I just don’t find any of it funny at all. It’s just not something I am willing to laugh or poke fun at. I certainly don’t have any first-hand knowledge of what she’s feeling, but if I were to make a guess I would say that she’s suffering postpartum depression, or at least some sort of postpartum breakdown.

I realize that my guess is just as uninformed as most of the bullshit that has been published about her, about any celebrity for that matter, and it could be that she just likes to party, but a lot of the behavior she has exhibited in the last few months reminds me of what I experienced after the birth of Leta. I felt as unstable as she is now acting.

I think she parties to self-medicate.

I am surprised that no one has brought this up yet, that no one in the media who is hounding her has taken a step back to consider that she might be on the brink of something disastrous, tragic for both her and her children. I can honestly say that if I had filed for divorce from my husband within the first year of Leta’s life that there is no way I would be alive today. If cameras had been following me around during those awful months you would have seen me throwing full gallon milk jugs at Jon’s head. You would have watched as I slammed the front door so hard that it fell off of its hinges, or the countless number of times I called Jon at the office just so that I could hang up on him. Maybe you would have seen me through the window as I stood in front of the medicine cabinet in the kitchen trying to figure out whether or not I had the nerve to take an entire bottle of Risperdal.

You wouldn’t have ever found me out at night flashing my bare vagina, but so what? I did things that were far worse, a lot of yelling, a lot of walking away, a lot of wishing I had never had a child. But I forgive myself for all of that because I was sick. I am not that person anymore. I wasn’t that person before my breakdown, and I’m doing everything I can to not ever become her again.

And while I understand that Britney Spears is not everyone’s cup of tea, that to most people she’s just a spoiled celebrity who has more money than sense, I would hope that other women and other mothers are looking at her with a little bit of compassion right now, if only for the sake of those two baby boys who are innocent in all of this. She is their mother. I had too many people pulling for me when I went through it to not extend that sympathy to her or to any other woman who might feel out of control enough to start sabotaging her life.