Lady Gaga's mom missed 'warning signs' of her daughter in 'crisis': 'For me, that’s a hard pill to still live with and swallow'
Lady Gaga‘s mother, Cynthia Germanotta, is still navigating her way through parenting, even though her two daughters, Stefani (the pop star’s given name), 32, and Natali Germanotta, 26, are grown and successful, to say the least.
She said she’s still learning. In fact, just last year she had an “aha moment” that changed the way she soothes her older daughter through her struggles, whether they are physical, emotional, or mental. It was “a very unexpected moment” when Gaga was going through a particularly rough period, she said.
Lady Gaga has had a tumultuous few years in her personal life — ending her engagement with Taylor Kinney in 2016, revealing that she has fibromyalgia in 2017, and continuing to combat PTSD and depression. Plus, between 2015 and 2016, she got even more candid about her history with sexual assault with the song “Til It Happens to You.” Gaga stripped down in the past few years, literally and figuratively, and has never been more vulnerable, and her mother was there for her during those difficult periods.
“This was a time when Stefani was really having some of her deepest struggles,” Germanotta confirmed on Wednesday during the Build Series and Born This Way Foundation’s Stories Matter event #BeKind21 in Conversation, in partnership with Oath and Tumblr. “And my husband and I wanted to swoop in and kind of fix everything. You know, as parents, we’re fixers, and we try to protect our children,” she said during her panel for the occasion.
So, on one particular occasion when Gaga really needed comforting, her parents took action. “My husband and I worked very hard to kind of try to get her out of the environment that she was in and take her for a walk and spend the next 30 minutes trying to fix the problem and counseling her or maybe giving her some advice,” the president and co-founder of the Born This Way Foundation recalled. And Gaga was grateful. “At the end of the walk that we had, she kind of looked at us and said, ‘You know, that was really lovely, and thank you for the walk.’”
The singer and now actress was struggling in complexity, but when it came to comfort, she required something quite simple. “I really just wanted you to listen to me,” she told her parents. “And I really just wanted you to validate my feelings.” Germanotta describes that moment as an “awakening” for her “and advice that I needed to hear as a parent.”
“All that she wanted was for me to just validate her needs,” she said.
The A Star Is Born actress wasn’t always this articulate, though. “Sometimes she did and sometimes she didn’t,” Germanotta told Yahoo Lifestyle about whether Gaga expressed her emotional needs growing up.
So the soft-spoken yet self-proclaimed gritty woman was left to guess what was going on with her “different” daughter. “Let’s just say she was very different growing up,” Gaga’s mom described. “And that led to a lot of difficult times for her. Normal things that other kids might experience — humiliation, taunting, and isolation — these are all things that affected her really deeply, and so deeply that she developed anxiety and depression in middle school. And it stayed with her to this day.”
Unfortunately, Germanotta didn’t always guess accurately. “Yes. Yes. There were so many,” she said matter-of-factly when asked if there were ever times when she felt helpless during Gaga’s childhood. “And when I look back, what I wish I knew — that’s the old adage, ‘If I only knew then what I know now,’ I didn’t really understand warning signs, like what was normal teenage behavior and when it was really a crisis situation. And I missed it,” she stated. She paused, before saying, “That, for me, that’s hard. That’s a hard pill to still live with and swallow because I feel like I made mistakes,” the regret audible in her otherwise clear, smooth speech.
She’s haunted by that, in a way. “I think about that. I definitely felt helpless and hopeless all of the time.” But Gaga’s struggles led to the development of the Born This Way Foundation. “Those experiences led to where we are with the foundation today,” Germanotta acknowledged.
Gaga and her mother founded Born This Way in 2012 to support young people and empower them to create a kinder and braver world. Earlier this month, the foundation — joined by more than 20 partners — launched the 21 Days to Be Kind Challenge. The challenge is meant to encourage participants to build habits that foster their own wellness as well as the strength of their communities.
Germanotta revealed to Yahoo Lifestyle that the foundation will be joining Gaga in Las Vegas for her Enigma residency. “We will be present. I can’t give all the particulars yet, but we’ll be there.”
This isn’t the first time Gaga has taken her humanitarian work on the road. The foundation joined her for stops on her “Joanne” tour. “I mean she’s very involved,” Germanotta promised. “I’ll get calls sometimes at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. that she has an idea about something for the foundation or she wants to implement this or that.” When she could be prepping for an upcoming concert, she sometimes decides to do some good instead. “People don’t really know this, but quite often on tour, it could be any city, she’ll just wake up and say, ‘I want to go to a foster home today,’ or ‘I want to do this.’”
It makes sense that she takes her foundation with her when she’s performing because that’s how it all started. “The road was very interesting because it was a very authentic and organic development,” Germanotta pointed out. “She would talk about her struggles onstage. As her career took off she would start talking to her fans about it like right onstage, and I didn’t quite get it as a mother. Partly not understanding why she was being so open,” she admitted. But once she saw that this was helping her daughter heal, it made perfect sense. “And other people were healing. Her friends were feeling empowered that, like, ‘Oh, Gaga, if you did it, maybe we can do it.’” As they continued to tour the world to promote Gaga’s music, they met people who’d had struggles like the singer and met kids who wanted to be part of the change and a solution. “And then she turned to me and said, ‘We really need to do something that’s more formalized,’ but it already existed,” her mom explained. “I like to say it was already a movement before … that message. Her bravery in talking to young people was what created this movement.”
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
Don’t believe the rumors — Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are pretty much obsessed with each other
What do Lady Gaga’s seriously bizarre new Instagram pictures actually mean?
Rick Genest, ‘Zombie Boy’ from Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ video, has died at age 32
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