Argon CA

Christina Aguilera's father beat her mother, and little Christina whispered every night, "Mommy, when can we go live to grandma's?" Years later she sang about it, and her father answered with a letter. In the video below, Christina explains why she sang Sound of Music songs out of a window as a child. "There's hope on the other side." Her father served in the Army, and for about three years the family lived on an army base in Japan. Christina says abuse ran rampant there and "the walls are paper thin." Her mother remembers that time: "I used to sleep with mace under my pillow." She left him when the abuse turned on Christina too, and took both girls to their grandmother's. As a star, Christina recorded "I'm OK" about her father and cried while she sang it. Her mother heard things in it that Christina hadn't realized were there, "like a little girl screaming." In the letter, her father wrote that he knew she had to do it to heal herself. "He made a mistake, he knows it," Christina says, but the song didn't bring them back together. At 42, Christina said it was still under the surface: "Trauma never leaves you." She has supported her family ever since she started earning, and still does. Did her father write to her out of remorse, or because the whole world had heard about him?