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| Brooke Shields |
Full Title: There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me by Brooke Shields
Brooke Shields’ earlier memoir, "Down Came the Rain", chronicled with candor the postpartum depression she suffered after the birth of her first child. This account undoubtedly gave encouragement to mothers in her position. A combination of antidepressants, psychotherapy, and overall tenderness and understanding from those closest to her, freed Ms. Shields to delight in the joys of new motherhood. Still, for those aware of her early, controversial film career, and her intense, turbulent relationship with her mother, there seemed to be an emotional element hinted at but not completely disclosed.
Teri Shields, (1933-2012) a divorced single mom with only one child, devoted all her consuming love and ambition into her daughter, Brooke Shields. At first, Brooke revelled in this absorption. No mother of any friend or playmate she knew made her child an absolute center, around whom all other concerns were peripheral. Life proved harmonious, until Brooke began to see increasing indications of her mother’s continuous drinking reaching an alarming dimension. This dependence on drink, never conquered, resulted in the first major rift between mother and daughter.
Still, after her mother’s seemingly successful stay in a substance abuse rehabilitation center, Brooke admits she missed her role as martyred daughter to the point where she found herself almost wishing her mom would relapse. She even tried to be defiant enough to provoke her to do so. Soon Brooke overcame this wish, allowing their loving relationship to resume. Eventually, Teri returned to her addiction, slowly at first, but then with growing nonchalance, until she was drinking as much as she always had, if not more.
At the same time, Brooke acknowledges few mothers would have given her the bolstering she needed during those times she craved it the most. In 1978, Teri Shields promoted the then pubescent Brooke towards stardom in a film in which her role would be that of a child prostitute. Upon the release of this film, “Pretty Baby”, the media flourished. Teri became a mother so frantic to gain her daughter a major film role as to allow her to demean and degrade herself. Still, according to Brooke, the film held no trace of pornography. In fact, she viewed it as an artistic production. When the media castigated young Brooke for failing to voice shame and remorse, her mother asked her, in private, if she felt proud of the work she had done. When Brooke said she did feel fulfilled, her mother advised her to ignore those who criticized her.
When, as a student at Princeton University, Brooke was initially shunned as a celebrity snob, she needed Teri to travel some distance in order to have dinner with her every Wednesday. At one point, Brooke’s isolation was such as to force her to phone her mother to say she felt she had to leave Princeton. Her mother, in what Brooke understood as her penultimate sacrifice, pleaded with her not to give up, advising her, if she did so, she would regret it for the rest of her life. Hence, Brooke continued, eventually forming friendships and relationships irrelevant to her status and fame.
Still, as she grew into adulthood, she claimed greater freedom. Her mother feeling alone and discarded became suffocating. The remainder of Brooke’s memoir focuses largely on the ways in which Brooke and Teri Shields negotiated what felt to them both like a separation almost too wrenching to be endured, while both knew it to be inevitable. When her mother died, Brooke, by then a mother of two growing daughters, concedes she felt, and at times continues to feel, the need for her “Mommy”. How many of us, at whatever age, can say, in all truth, we do not sometimes yearn to return to that same insulation against the tedium and miseries of day-to-day life.
