Tina Knowles, the mother of global music superstars Beyoncé and Solange, is opening up about her personal relationship with her mother, details about her divorces, her own parenting and the girl group Destiny’s Child.
Knowles, a businesswoman, fashion designer and former stylist for Destiny’s Child, is telling her life story in her memoir, “Matriarch,” where she reveals a complicated but loving relationship with her own mother, who she described as “overprotective” and “fearful.”
At one point, Knowles said she wanted to be a singer herself and was even in a girl group known as The Veltones.
“I wanted to be a singer, but you know, this little town was about that big and there were no singers there and that’s what my mom said. My mom, as, you know, as much as I loved her and she wanted the best for me, she would’ve done anything for me to be a singer, she really didn’t have any hope.”
She told “CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King in an exclusive interview that that aspect of her upbringing influenced how she parented.
“I was gonna trust my kids and even though I never believed in being friends, … but I wanted to be trusted by them,” she said, adding that she wanted them to know the sky was the limit when it came to achieving their dreams.
“‘Cause my parents put limitations on me. Not because they wanted to, because they didn’t want me to be disappointed or hurt,” she said. “I told my girls that all the time, you could be whatever you wanna be. You could do whatever you wanna do and I’m gonna be right there to help make it happen.”
Impact on parenting
Knowles spoke with King about how different her daughters were growing up. She said once a teacher recommended Beyoncé repeat a grade in school. Knowles said, now a global superstar, Beyoncé was shy and quiet until she got to know people.
“Never shy around us,” Knowles said. “At home, she was entertaining. She was singing, she was dancing and she was doing all the things that I did. … So she would get quiet until she got to know you.”
A former teacher told Knowles in her evaluation that Beyoncé was a bright student.
“I took her to Ms. Little. … Was an ex-teacher there who was very stern, but she said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with this girl. This girl is very bright. She just doesn’t care to let you know it.'”
Conversely, Knowles described Solange as “very outgoing” and would “walk into the room and be like, ‘yes, I’m here.'”
When Beyoncé and Solange were 12 and 7 years old, Knowles put them in therapy together. It was a controversial decision within her own family as her then husband, Mathew Knowles, objected.
“He was like, ‘I don’t want any parts of that,'” Knowles said.
For Knowles it was important as she started to see separation between her two daughters.
“Beyoncé had become like this little star in the town and she was always so close to Solange and so kind to her, but then she was in the singing group, so everything took place in our house,” she said. The other girls in the group would tell Solange to shut up and be quiet and all that and I started noticing that she wasn’t protecting her sister.”
Knowles’ goal through therapy was to ensure the two grew up close, telling King, “whatever I have to do to make that happen.”
Beginnings of Destiny’s Child
Knowles said she tried to be a singer, and although for her it didn’t work out, she used her skills to help her daughters achieve their dreams.
“God has always given me these tools from day one that I could go back and pull out and who would’ve ever thought that I would wind up making costumes for Destiny’s Child? Or that I would be doing hair and all the things I did for our group and even the rehearsals and the discipline of that and the harmonies … I got to use it with the girls,” she said.
But Knowles admits there were problems along the way. She said the label didn’t like the way she styled Destiny’s Child.
“They dressed like an R&B group. We love the big glamour. And their hair was too big ’cause we came from Texas,” she said. “They just thought that it was too much for those young girls and that they should be in jeans and t-shirts like all the pop icons at the time. In the meantime, everywhere we went, people were saying,’ Where can we get these outfits?'”
Knowles said the criticism from the label hurt her feelings, but it was a moment she remembers her husband, Mathew, pushing back.
“He was just bold and when I talk about him, that’s one of the things that he went to bat for me all the time, he fought, he protected me.”
Navigating marriage and parenting criticisms
Knowles also wrote candidly in her memoir about the highs and lows of her 30-year marriage to Mathew Knowles.
She said from the beginning, there was infidelity in their marriage on his part and she realized she needed to be prepared.
“I was pregnant and things were — they just got really bad at that time. I knew that I had to make a move and I didn’t want to be dependent on him,” she said.
She started planning what she called her escape plan. Knowles opened a hair salon called Headliners, which was so successful it became the family’s main source of income and helped to fund Beyoncé’s budding musical career. Mathew Knowles left his sales executive role at Xerox and started working as Destiny’s Child’s manager full-time. Their partnership as parents helped to hold their marriage together.
“People say to me, ‘how did you stay so long?’ And I’m like, ‘well, I was married for 33 years, but 33 years were not bad.’ … You know, maybe 15 of them were bad, but we would have these long stretches where we would do really great.”
While their marriage struggled, Knowles said they were always present parents, but subject to scrutiny. She recalled the criticism people would say after Solange became pregnant as a teenager.
“Crazy stuff like, ‘well you wasn’t paying no attention. You’re so busy running behind B that you couldn’t see’ — blah, blah, blah. I’m like, ‘that is absolutely not true.'”
Knowles went on to say, people didn’t understand Solange’s history.
“They didn’t know the backstory of Solange losing her best friend and wanting to hurry up and be a grownup ’cause she thought she wouldn’t live so long.”
Knowles said Solange made it clear she was getting married.
“I said, ‘OK, well let me at least give you a wedding,’ you know, and made it memorable for her, but you can’t control somebody else’s life. It’s their life.”
Knowles also wrote about an untrue rumor that surfaced during Beyoncé’s first pregnancy, where people said she wasn’t carrying the baby.
“She went on a show in Australia and she had this very broad cloth type of dress,” Knowles said about Beyoncé. “She wasn’t huge pregnant. She was very proud of her little stomach and she bent over and the fabric of the dress bent … they started this vicious, horrible rumor that she wasn’t pregnant.”
Knowles expressed her heartache over the situation and anger over people thinking her daughter faked a pregnancy and used prosthetics.
“I was never so enraged because this should have been a sacred experience and what they didn’t know is that my child had been through a couple miscarriages, which were so painful.”
Knowles admitted she did not speak up even as the devastating rumor escalated, saying that Beyoncé thought it would go away and handles these situations well.
“I’m not so good at that. I will cuss you out about my kids,” Knowles said. “That was one of the worst times of my life. It really was. I would cry, I would get so mad and I would get so upset.”
Divorces and moving forward
When she decided to get divorced from Mathew Knowles, she said she spent a week in bed depressed. Her longtime therapist gave her an exercise to do: Make a list of accomplishments and failures.
“I had such an easy time writing the bad stuff. When I got to the positive stuff, I had such a hard time,” she said. “What I realized about myself is that I wasn’t really comfortable with people telling me great things about me.”
She said she had not taken credit for some of her accomplishments in the past, like her work with Destiny’s Child in an effort to be humble. She would tell herself, “it’s not about you.”
But then she started making her list.
“I started getting mad and writing those things down,” she said. “I started my salon. It was a success. You know, I raised some great kids. All the people I’ve met in my life, like I have had a hell of a life.”
Four years after her divorce from Mathew Knowles, Tina Knowles married actor Richard Lawson. They were together for 10 years. She said she feels grateful for the relationship, even though it ultimately ended.
“I’ve known Richard for 40-something years and I think he’s a great person,” she said. “So I don’t have any regrets about the time that we spent together. I did feel a lot of pressure about ending the marriage because I had so many people to come up to me and tell me about that hope, but – it’s not a tragedy.”
She said she would love to find love again, but is at peace if she doesn’t.
“I am finally feeling — it is sad that I’m 71 years old and I know that I am enough and if I don’t I’m gonna be just fine because I got such a full, great life. And I’m so blessed, and you know, it’s gonna be – it’s all good.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tina-knowles-memoir-motherhood-beyonce-solange-destinys-child/
