Beyoncé wasn’t a supportive elder sister growing up.
Her mother Tina Knowles, 71, took a trip down her memory lane in a recent conversation with CNN News Central as she promoted her new memoir Matriarch.
The author, who is mom to the Queen of Pop, 43, and Solange, 38, recalled in the interview how she was afraid at a point that her daughters were growing apart when Beyonce turned 10.
“I was terrified when Beyoncé turned around ten,” she first confessed, before recalling, “She might have been ten or eleven, and she was in the singing group.”
“And the kids would say to Solange every day, ‘Be quiet, Solange,’ because she would try to choreograph and, you know, she wanted to be involved. She bossed it, too. And they didn’t want her involved.”
“Then I started noticing that Beyonce would allow them to talk to her like that. Or she would say, ‘OK, Mom, can you get Solange out of here? Because she is,'” Tina recalled.
However, Tina immediately corrected Beyoncé on that as she recounted telling her eldest daughter, “‘Wait a minute, this is her house, and you’ve got to be nice to her.’ And I told her all the things, you know, how important it was for her.”
“Finally, I realised that they weren’t listening, and I saw a wall between them coming, and so I got them in therapy,” she told the publication as she revealed her next move: therapy.
Tina’s then-husband did not favour the decision as in the early 90s therapy was “really taboo.”
“‘I’m not asking. I’m going to find somebody.’ And I found this wonderful therapist, child therapist,” she recalled telling her then-husband as she persisted.
“It’s funny because he told Beyoncé all the things I had told her, but she listened from him, even though she hated therapy. She hated going. Solange loved therapy. She loved talking and, you know, expressing herself.”
“The outcome was great,” Tina revealed at last.
