Kellie Pickler was born in 1986, and she grew up in Albemarle, North Carolina. When she was only 2, her mother, Cynthia Morton, left the family; she regained custody for another two years, but then disappeared for good. In her song “I Wonder,” Pickler would later sing, “Did you think I didn’t need you here? / To hold my hand, to dry my tears / Did you even miss me, through the years at all?”
Morton addressed exactly that when her daughter became famous, offering a justification for why she’d been absent while Pickler was growing up. “I’m not as bad as they say,” she insisted, detailing a past filled with domestic abuse (via StarNews Online). Morton added, “I just made bad choices.”
Because Pickler’s mother wasn’t around, she was instead raised in her early years by her father, who struggled with alcoholism and frequently spent time in jail. “It was a battle to have to go and visit him in the penitentiary as a child, but that was so normal for me,” Pickler later told The Boot. “Looking at it now, as an adult, that’s not normal.” As both of her parents struggled, Pickler was left to essentially raise herself and her siblings. “When you grow up around the drugs and the alcohol and that kind of abuse, the people that you interact with, drug dealers,” she reflected, “there’s a lot of stuff that people don’t know.”
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