Lynne Spears on Britney: "We Didn't Know What We Were Doing"

The following italicized article is from www.usmagazine.com:

Lynne Spears admitted on Wednesday's Today show that her family wasn't ready for Britney's fast rise to fame.

Asked by Meredith Vieira if she wishes she had done things differently, Lynne said, "shoulda, coulda, woulda."

"It's kind of like Britney was sent out into the world a little bit prematurely," Lynne said while promoting her memoir Through the Storm.

She denied she was ever a stage mom, saying, "Britney pushed me."

When Britney began her career, Lynne said she was a single mom who also had to raise Jamie Lynn, so she couldn't always be there.

"Did I want to be there? Of course!" she said. "Was it feasible? It wasn't."

Lynne compared her situation to when parents send their children off to college.

"You don't really know what they're doing in college ... just as Britney set out two years earlier to be a star," she said.

"She's out there, she's with the crowds and with her peer groups, and she's doing things -- she's a celebrity, for heaven's sake!" Lynne added.

Lynne said she felt she lost control the moment Britney posed nearly naked with a Teletubby on a 1999 Rolling Stone cover.

She said she wouldn't have agreed to let Britney strip down, but "we didn't really know what we were doing."

"We were so in awe," she said. "I never even bought [Rolling Stone], but I just heard this is a really big deal."

"We were kind of in shock at what was going on," Lynne continued. "It was a two-day shoot. Thank god [manager] Larry Rudolph came in and said, 'Stop, that's enough.'"

Lynne added, "We didn't have any choice over pictures ... We had no one who could tell us what we were supposed to be doing."

Did Lynne get sucked into fame?

"It was more of an excitement at first," she said. "It seems like everything's fabulous: Look at the trips she gets to go on!

"There was that honeymoon period where it looked like she could do no wrong," Lynne said. "Then there's that ugly side of fame ... and we weren't ready for that."

As things started to unravel -- Britney's 55-hour marriage to Jason Alexander, two kids in two years, her K-Fed divorce, the shaving of her head, stints in rehab -- Lynne said, "it was so crazy
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"I don't think anybody was even trying to sit and think of what was going on," she said. "We were praying very hard. It seemed like we had no control over what was happening."

She was so desperate to get in contact with her daughter she said she remembers telling her friends: "If you see my behind going over that wall into the Summit [Britney's house], it's me because it's my last drastic measure."

Looking back, Lynne said, "I have sat for hours, thinking and thinking about everything that's happened. It's been a whirlwind. When you mix extreme heightened celebrity hood and then when you have heartache ... The mixture's just not healthy."

Source: US Magazine