Jamie Lynn Spears has experienced lots of ups and downs over the years.
The little sister of Britney Spears, she quickly rose to fame in her early teens as a musician and actress.
Her career went into a tailspin, however, following the revelation that Jamie Lynn was pregnant at 16.
Despite some bumps along the way (including a bizarre knife-wielding incident last year), Jamie Lynn has settled into a life of quiet and content domesticity.
In fact, when you compare Jamie’s situation to those of some of her teen mom contemporaries (We’re looking at you, Jenelle Evans!), she comes off looking like a veritable role model for young mothers.
These days, Jamie Lynn is married to Jamie Watson, and her daughter, Maddie, recently celebrated her eighth birthday.
Of course, she had to overcome some major obstacles to get where she is.
Jamie Lynn is the subject of a TLC documentary special that premiered last night, and for the first time, she shared the story of how she learned she was knocked up:
“[My friends and I] decided to get our friend to go and buy a pregnancy test. We stopped to get gas and she was like ‘Just go and take the test real quick’,” she recalls.
“We didn’t want to do it at home, so I went in the BP and I took a pregnancy test. I sat on the thing and we … sat there looking and my friend looks down and she freaks out and I was like ‘’What? What? What?’ and the test was positive and I was pregnant.
“So I got the news in the ladies room at the BP, that about sums it all up,” she says.
Jamie Lynn said she knew the public reaction to the news would be mostly negative, but she was determined to do what she felt was right from the moment she first found out she was pregnant:
“I knew I had a lot of young girls who looked up to me and I felt that responsibility, but at the end of the day I knew I would have to make a decision as a young girl myself, to do something that I could sleep with at night,” she says.
“I knew deep down that I was going to have my little girl, even if I had to raise her on my own, which is what I did.”
Spears has maintained a relationship with Maddie’s father, Casey Aldridge, and she says Watson cares for his stepdaughter as though she were his own.
16-year-old Jamie Lynn probably didn’t imagine things could work out so well for her on the night she received the news that would change her life in that BP restroom.
