Britney Spears reveals she traded her freedom for access to her sons

We’re just a few days away from the Oct. 24 release of Britney Spears’ highly anticipated memoir, The Woman In Me. And as more and more excerpts are released, we’re learning about more heartbreaking details of Spears’ life, especially the 13 years she spent under a conservatorship with her personal, financial, and medical decisions under the control of her father and a lawyer.

In a newly released passage, we learn that Spears gave in to their control so she wouldn’t risk losing time with her two sons, now-18-year-old Sean Preston and 17-year-old Jayden James, whom she shares with her ex-husband, Kevin Federline.

Spears wrote that after being involuntarily hospitalized twice following her 2008 breakdown, she quickly learned that she was physically no match for her father and the others who sought to control her.

“After being held down on a gurney, I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to,” she wrote. “And so I went along with it.”

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But mentally and emotionally, she still tried to push back — until she realized that they could keep her away from her kids. Then, she said, she did what was asked of her.

“My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make,” she wrote.

In other parts of the book, the “Toxic” singer writes of how she was “robbed” of her freedom and “stripped of [her] womanhood” during the conservatorship, which lasted from 2008 until last June, when a judge ruled that she could oversee her own affairs after she made an impassioned plea for freedom in court.

“Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick,” she wrote in her memoir. 

The Woman In Me is out Oct. 24. It’s available for pre-order now.