Janet Jackson‘s marriages are her biggest “disappointment.”
The 58-year-old singer eloped with James DeBarge in September 1984 but had their union annulled 14 months later before she secretly wed Rene Elizondo Jr. in 1991 and then Wissam Al Mana — the father of her 7-year-old son Eissa — in 2012. She’s admitted none of the unions turned out as she’d hoped, particularly the one with Al Mana, which ended just months after their son was born in 2017.
“Every one of my marriages,” Jackson told The Guardian newspaper’s Saturday magazine, in response to a question about her biggest disappointments. Then, she corrected herself.
“Just the last one,” she said.
Jackson has previously spoken about being in controlling relationships — particularly with Al Mana – and said she hopes she will finally be able to “break that pattern” if she finds love again.
“I pray to God,” she said. “I’m single, so I pray to God that I might have different lenses on these eyes than I did before. I know that if someone were to come along … even if I didn’t recognize it, I guarantee you my friends would shake the s— out of me and say, ‘What are you doing?!’ But I think I’m seeing it through different lenses now. I think I am breaking that pattern.”
Jackson was just 9 years old when she made her TV debut, performing a duet with her brother Randy on “The Carol Burnett Show,” and she’s determined her son’s childhood will be different.
“Completely different, because I worked and he doesn’t,” Jackson said. “And that’s it. I want him to experience being a child, because you don’t get to do this over. You’re an adult for the rest of your life, so I want him to enjoy each and every minute of being a child.”
Jackson said there were things she “hated” as she paid a price for childhood stardom.
“Don’t you think you’ve learned from your parents?” she said. “There are some things you wish your parents had done differently and you say, ‘No, I’m gonna tell [my son] this.’ Because if they had done this with me, it would have been much better for me as a child. I hated it as a kid, but I’m thankful for it now. I have to give credit to my parents for keeping me grounded.”
