Beyoncé’s mom Tina Knowles wasn’t ever going to let her daughters not get along as sisters should.
The Matriarch author shares the “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” singer as well as fellow singer Solange with her ex-husband Mathew Knowles, to whom she was married from 1980 to 2011.
She raised the girls — along with honorary daughter Kelly Rowland — in Houston, Texas, and recently revealed that she put them in therapy early on when she felt a distance growing between them.
While promoting her new memoir Matriarch, in conversation with Sara Sidner on CNN News Central, Tina reflected on how she helped “forge” the relationship between Beyoncé and Solange, who are five years apart, and whose mom described as “very, very different” growing up.
“I was terrified when Beyonce 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,” she revealed.
© Houston Chronicle/Hearst NewspapThe doting mom further shared: “Or she would say, ‘OK, Mom, can you get Solange out of here? Because she is’ — and I’m like, ‘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 realized that they weren’t listening, and I saw a wall between them coming, and so I got them in therapy,” she ultimately said.
© Jeff KravitzTina then acknowledged that at the time — the early 1990s — therapy was “really taboo,” and that her then-husband considered the girls “too young” for it, but she persisted.
“‘I’m not asking. I’m going to find somebody.’ And I found this wonderful therapist, child therapist,” she further recalled, adding: “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.”
© Getty Images“The outcome was great,” she went on, and emphasized: “The outcome was great.”
Today, Beyoncé herself is a mom to daughter Blue Ivy, 13, and twins Rumi and Sir, seven, who she shares with husband Jay-Z, while Solange is a mom to Daniel Julez J. Smith Jr., 20, who she shared with ex-husband Daniel Smith.
