Actress and model Brooke Shields wrote a book about my mother and me, with added glamour, stardom and paparazzi.
Well, at least that’s what it felt like reading Brooke’s 2014 memoir, “There was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me.”
Brooke’s acting and modeling career began at an early age. Her mother was her manager; this had attracted public and media attention. People were quick to judge Teri Shields’ parenting and their mother-daughter relationship.
“Teri Terrific,” as Brooke referred to her mother, was an alcoholic. It was known to the public that Teri had a drinking problem. Brooke’s relationship with her mother was extremely complicated and she felt the public did not see the true version of her mother. She bravely detailed this in her memoir.
It AMAZES me that no matter the lifestyle or background, the adult child of an alcoholic story is essentially the same story. Brooke and I have very little in common on the surface. She traveled the world, was dubbed America’s sweetheart, starred in numerous films and international ad campaigns, was friends with superstars like Michael Jackson and graduated from Princeton. Not quite mirroring my life… 😊 Yet as adult children of alcoholics, Brooke and I have so much in common; we know well the lifelong, complex emotional torture of having an alcoholic mother. Our lives were shaped by similar complicated, often-misunderstood mother-daughter relationships.
I highly recommend choosing the audiobook version of this story.
Brooke herself reads it. It feels like she’s your new friend sitting across from you at a coffee shop. You’re listening as she eloquently and poignantly tells the story – all the while, you’re thinking, OMG, she’s telling MY story! That’s the thing about adult children of alcoholics – or anyone who loves someone with addiction – the feelings/emotional impact is shockingly similar. Variations of the same unfortunate story. It’s a bittersweet feeling knowing you’re so not alone in your experience.
Five ways Brooke Shields’ memoir perfectly told the adult child of an alcoholic life story
There are five points of Brooke Shields’ memoir that will resonate with adult children of alcoholics or spouses, siblings, friends and other people who love people with addictions.
1. All Brooke ever wanted in life was for her mother to happy.
Even when busy with school or a film, Brooke’s content-ness hinged on her mother’s state. Ain’t that familiar. Brooke described looking at photos of her mother taken in her young adult days and thinking how happy her mother looked and how she wished she could make her mother feel as happy as she looked in those photos. These feelings continue throughout Brooke’s life; she was always so focused on her mother’s lack of happiness. This continued to the final weeks of Teri’s life when she was in hospice. Brooke wished her mother to be peaceful and have serenity but instead, she just looked scared and wouldn’t even let Brooke pry open her gripped hands so that Brooke could hold her hands. That figurative wall was still there all the way to the end.
2. Brooke felt completely responsible for her mother’s life – and her drinking.
Even though Teri managed Brooke’s young career, Brooke was often in the mother role – the common parent-child role reversal we know all too well. As Teri’s alcoholism worsened over the years, Brooke did everything she could to “fix” her. Just like I did with my mother, Brooke begged through tears, wrote heartful letters, gave the cold shoulder for punishment, organized an intervention, bailed her out of jail – the list goes on. But these efforts were not successful.
“Mom would not stop drinking,” Brooke wrote. “I could only believe I wasn’t doing enough to make her stop…It took me 30 years to realize that nothing I did could make her stop. She did not want to nor ever stop by herself. At the time, I still thought I could fix things…I felt helpless. Why wasn’t I enough to help her stop drinking?”
Helplessly codependent.
3. Brooke was a perfectionist and sought her mother’s approval.
Brooke described that on set, she was usually only nervous when her mother was watching her. She never felt “enough” and craved her mother’s approval. Teri showered her with copious amounts of love and affection but then in terrible drunken rants, called her fat, an ingrate and overrated. It was extremely confusing.
So, Brooke immersed herself in work to distract from the growing anxiety about her mother’s drinking. On some sets, she developed OCD habits that were labeled simply actor superstition.
“There was safety in having to be accountable to my job,” she wrote. “It became easier to avoid my mother’s drinking.”
4. The most difficult thing Brooke ever experienced in life was her mother’s alcoholism.
Being a celebrity is much more challenging than most people realize, I think. Actors work grueling 12-15 hours/day on tight filming deadlines, often in extreme conditions. Then there’s the pressure and scrutiny of being under the media microscope. You’re either loved or hated. Yet Brooke wrote that hands down, what challenged her most in life was the hope she held onto her whole life that her mother would get help and celebrate sobriety.
“I craved my mother’s sobriety,” she wrote. “Fame was fake and fickle. My mother’s drinking was real and consistent.”
Teri’s drinking always part of her life and affected major life memories. As a young girl, Brooke learned there was no Santa because Teri passed out on Christmas Eve. At 22 after graduation from Princeton, Brooke was still constantly worried her mom, even though she felt she was supposed to be focusing on the next phase of her career and forging her own path in adulthood.
“Every time the phone rang later at night, I was sure it was going to be the police,” she wrote.
After Brooke’s wedding, her mother took off without telling anyone and wandered aimlessly for three days. For Brooke’s second wedding, Teri promised that she wouldn’t drink. She did and delivered an uncomfortable, sloppy toast at the reception. While this constant worry lessened as Brooke became a mother herself and focused on her growing family, it was still there.
5. Brooke’s relationship with her mother was extremely complicated and conflicted.
As an adult child of an alcoholic, I read reviews of the book and could guess with accuracy which ones were written by people who’ve loved people with addiction and those who have never experienced addiction in their families. They comment that Brooke went back and forth throughout the memoir defending her mother and then seemingly resenting her for the negative effects. Some people were confused by this, as if they wanted her to pick one emotion. Do you love and forgive her or are you angry/hurt/resentful? If you asked me this question about my own mother, I’d reply, yep, all of the above. I guess people crave simplicity in stories. But this is the ACoA life. It’s anything but simple.
Conflicting feelings will always envelope my relationship with my mother.
“It was so strange,” Brooke wrote. “I did not want to be near her but being away from home and not being able to monitor her was even more torturous.”
In her 20s, Brooke realized that she needed to set a very clear boundary with her mother. She needed to hire a new manager. It was extremely painful and it felt wrong. When she delivered the news to her mother in person, she wanted to take the words back and let it all go back to the way it had always been: her mother calling the shots. But she knew that even though it felt so wrong, it had to happen for her happiness and her career.
Brooke’s memoir is a compelling reminder that people with glamourous, envy-worthy lives in the public spotlight can be living the very same life as you. There is a lot that the cameras never capture.
If Brooke were growing up today, I suspect her life would have been very different. Armed with addiction education and empowered by others sharing their ACoA stories, she could have addressed codependency earlier, taken control of her career and accepted that her only job in life is to take good care of her.
But loving someone with a substance use disorder or other addiction will always be complicated. Addiction takes the most wonderful people – kind, intelligent, determined, selfless and loving people. This is conflicting because we know and love the true version of our addicted loved ones but then we must witness what addiction does to them. We must accept when these loved ones do not want help or cannot find sobriety. We must focus on the good of our relationship and the human being we love.
I hope you are well in your journey.
