Cryptic Britney Spears Post Hints at Reconciliation With Father

Britney Spears has people thinking she may be open to a relationship with her father after she published a cryptic post on Instagram.

The 42-year-old pop star has made several social media comments criticizing her family in recent years, especially when she was trying to terminate her 13-year conservatorship. When the "Gimme More" hitmaker was under the conservatorship her personal and financial decisions were taken out of her control and in one post she accused her dad, Jamie Spears, of "abuse" and of "controlling" her. The arrangement was put into place in 2008 amid mental health concerns and in November 2021, the conservatorship was dissolved by a judge.

On Tuesday TMZ reported that her father—who headed the conservatorship the pop star was put under—had to have one of his legs amputated after a serious infection. The news organization reported that the 71-year-old underwent five surgeries on the leg, leading to an extended stint in hospital.

The same day the news broke, Britney Spears posted a slew of throwback family snaps. While the majority of them show her now-teenage sons when they were younger, one photo shows Jamie Spears standing next to his daughter, holding his grandson's lunchbox and a juice box. Britney Spears turned off comments for the post and for the caption she had only written the credit for each photo.

Newsweek reached out to Britney Spears' publicist for comment via email Wednesday.

TMZ also reported that, after releasing her memoir, The Woman in Me, on October 24, Britney Spears has been trying to get closer to her family. According to sources who spoke with the site, she has expressed sympathy for her father's situation and "once even talked about sending him money to help him out."

The signs of the star reconciling with her family don't end there. According to Page Six, her mother and brother, Lynne and Bryan Spears, attended her 42nd birthday party in Los Angeles Friday night. In a black-and-white photo shared to X, formerly Twitter, the singer can be seen hugging her mom, 68, and linking arms with her brother, 46. According to TMZ, Britney Spears' is also in communication with her 32-year-old sister, Jamie Lynn Spears.

This news comes after Britney Spears revealed in her memoir the last straw that led to her cutting ties with her immediate family. Although she seems to have changed her attitude toward her family since then, she wrote in her book that things came to a head when she traveled back to her Kentwood, Louisiana, hometown to visit them during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

"Because of the way quarantines were and his work schedule, I didn't have Hesam ['Sam' Asghari, her then-partner] with me. I was so lonely, I even got to missing my family," she wrote. "I called my mom and said, 'I want to see you guys.' She said, 'We're shopping right now. Gotta go! We'll call you later.' And then they didn't."

She wrote that she gave up trying to reach her family and went to visit them after realizing that Louisiana's lockdown laws were less stringent than those in California. At the time of traveling to see her family, she said that she was "still scared of them, and I wanted to make nice." However, things soon turned sour.

"It was during this period of time with my family that I learned that while I'd been in my mental health facility, they'd thrown away a lot of what I'd had stored at my mother's house," she wrote in her memoir. "The Madame Alexander dolls I'd collected as a girl were all gone. So were three years' worth of my writing. I had a binder full of poetry that had real meaning for me. All gone.

"When I saw the empty shelves, I felt an overwhelming sadness. I thought of the pages I'd written through tears. I never wanted to publish them or anything like that, but they were important to me. And my family had thrown them in the trash, just like they'd thrown me away."

Eventually, the star realized that she could start again and move on. She explained: "In that moment, I made peace with my family—by which I mean that I realized I never wanted to see them again, and I was at peace with that."