BROOKE SHIELDS: My mother’s alcoholism was a source of agony for me. I was always on edge… always guilt ridden. I wanted my own daughters to be free of those feelings

As a kid, I was constantly burdened by obligations – whether to my mother, societal pressure, the demands of the movie industry or even the public’s expectations of who I was supposed to be.

Then I went to Princeton University as a student, which should have been a liberation. But I was desperate to come home.

And I was in New Jersey, only one state away from my mum. It wasn’t exactly like being in Europe. My very first semester, I cried and cried and cried.

I would go home on Friday after my last class, stay for the weekend and drive back on Monday. Every week.

I also made my mother drive out every Wednesday to take me out to dinner. I was so isolated – not because people were mean but because they were trying to give me my privacy.

And being alone made me panic. It felt like wasted time. I wholeheartedly believed I should be filling every moment with conversation or fulfilling an obligation or checking a box.

My mother hadn’t given me the tools I needed. She controlled me so much, in every possible way, that when I went to college and had to navigate the world on my own, I was in shock. I was like an open wound. Totally vulnerable.

I wanted something different for my two daughters, and I tried to arm them with the ability to trust their instincts, keep their wits about them and be prepared, self-assured and self-protective.

My mother had made it her job to protect me, and while I did have a sense of always being tended to, loved and watched over (which can feel really nice as a kid), she also did me a disservice, because for so long I had no clue about how to actually protect myself or live on my own.

Anyway, my girls have a lot of skills I never did. And I’m so glad – I’d be devastated if I felt I’d repeated my mother’s mistakes.

Sending them both off to college has been the beginning of a whole new phase of life. One that comes with the same fear and uncertainty my daughters are grappling with, but also the same exhilaration and freedom.

Because suddenly I can do anything. No longer do I need to worry about picking them up, or about taking a job that will force me to travel.

I also don’t have to worry about accidentally contradicting myself or opening the apps on my phone too slowly or inadvertently making a hypocritical decision or simply breathing wrong.

My daughters watched me like a hawk, and there’s some comfort in being able to move around the house without the unforgiving eyes of teenagers in every room. To revel in a lazy Sunday or say, ‘Yes, I think I will enjoy another cocktail, thank you’.

There’s also a freedom of discovery in this period. With all that time I once spent catering to my girls, I can now cater to myself.

I started a haircare brand. And I began taking dance classes for the first time in ages, and I can’t think of any word to describe them other than joyous (albeit slightly more painful than I remember).

When our eldest, Rowan, went off to study in Italy, I visited her there and spent the days solo while she was in classes. At 58, it was my first time being alone in a foreign city. I have spent my whole life travelling the world, but I was always with my mother or a bodyguard or an assistant or my husband or on a movie set with a handler of some kind.

This trip, there was no assistant director telling me where to go, no PR person instructing me on talking points, no assistant reminding me that I have another Zoom in ten minutes, not even a family member with an obligatory agenda.

To be roaming around Italy, with no one aware of exactly where I was… it was a bit unsettling. But also exhilarating!

I wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, which meant I blended in with most American tourists, and that presented another form of freedom. I wandered into cafes and talked to store clerks and sat at the base of the Duomo with a Peroni, gazing up at the stunning architecture.

I got lost and spent a lot of time on Google Maps, but it felt like a long-overdue rite of passage. I’m coming up to 60, but I’m still growing up and trying new things and learning about myself.

My mother was also my agent, and she controlled my life far more than I was aware of at the time.

When I was in my early 50s, my godmother mentioned to me in passing that Sam Cohn, who was one of the most powerful agents in the 1970s and 1980s, had wanted to represent me when I was young.

This was the first time I had heard anything about it. ‘My God,’ I agonised, ‘if I’d signed with him back then, it would have fundamentally changed the trajectory of my acting career.’

My mum would never have allowed it, though, because if he was in, she would have been out.

At age 50, I felt validated that someone with as keen an eye as Sam Cohn could see my potential. But mostly, hearing all those years later about that lost opportunity made me think, ‘What the f*** good does that do me now?’ My mum wanted to manage my career her way, and didn’t want anyone else to get to me.

Whether it was for protection or to keep me for herself, I can’t really say, but she believed she knew best.

I think about what my career would have looked like had I known, or if I’d had the guts to demand a professional agent – any professional agent – earlier.

Maybe I wouldn’t have become someone they made a doll of or who had branded hairdryers (hundreds of which still sit in my garage).

Perhaps I wouldn’t have had to go to Japan to do a Nescafe commercial in the mid-1990s just to hold on to our brownstone house in New York.

My mum always billed herself as someone who was non-judgmental – she really hung her hat on that – but that’s not how she came across to me.

I always felt like I was going to be in trouble for something, or that I was wrong, and I was often waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is a consequence of being raised by an alcoholic.

Mum’s alcoholism was a constant source of agony for me, and I was always a little skittish and on edge.

Work, even if I knew both the industry and public opinion to be fickle, felt stable in the sense that when you were on set, the space was contained and there were rules by which you had to abide. You and your schedule were always accounted for. That was freeing in a way.

At home with my mum, on the other hand, I never knew what was going to happen. Plans would change at a moment’s notice. So would moods.

I wanted to protect my own kids from living with feelings of instability, uncertainty or fear, so I built in routine and ritual wherever I could. I encouraged them to be outspoken and opinionated rather than timid. I urged them to express their opinions. I wanted them to know that nothing was off-limits, that we could talk about anything. That didn’t mean there weren’t consequences, but we’d discuss why they acted a certain way.

Obviously, my relationship with my own mother was complicated. My whole life I went to her for absolutely everything.

Yes, I feared being judged or reprimanded. Yes, I was guilt-ridden whenever I thought my behaviour would disappoint her.

And yet the pull to her was so strong. A magnetic field surrounded her, and even when I knew better, I was always pulled back in. Love is a very powerful motivator.

There’s old footage of my mum and me in the documentary Pretty Baby – I’m learning to dive and my mother is sitting poolside, giving me feedback. You see me pop out of the water and swim over to her and the first words out of my mouth are, ‘What am I doing wrong?’

She’s directing me to ‘think out, not down, and think all the way across to the other end of the pool’. She’s gesturing with her hands from the comfort of a lounge chair, where she’s fully clothed in a lovely pink dress.

Only in rewatching the documentary did it dawn on me… she didn’t even know how to swim! She was never taught, but I followed her coaching as if she were a professional.

That was our relationship in a nutshell. She was the expert, even when she wasn’t, and I assumed that, however I was doing something, I could be doing it better. To me, she was the arbiter of all things Brookie. The one thing I did not consult my mother about was parenting.

It truly saddens me that my girls didn’t grow up knowing my parents. My dad died three weeks before Rowan was born, and my mum was already in decline by the time the kids were no longer babies.

But even when Rowan and Grier were babies, I learned very quickly that, beyond raising me, Mum couldn’t handle children.

I wanted her to be the sweet little old granny (I should have known better) or the kooky brash fun grandma who spoiled them rotten (more likely), but instead she stood off to the side, not sure what to make of these children or of this new relationship of which she was supposed to be a part.

The girls were alien to her – they were an extension of me and yet had nothing, really, to do with her, and something about that didn’t compute. It was as if she wasn’t even blood-related, which she obviously was.

The girls didn’t respond to my mother the way I did as a kid – they weren’t deferential or in awe of her, and she couldn’t control them the way she did me – and I don’t think she knew what to do with that.

She wasn’t jealous of them, exactly, but there was a notion of ‘Who are these strangers taking up your time and your life and who have somehow replaced me? And why don’t they, too, love me unconditionally?’ (There must be whole chapters written on this type of reaction in a book I imagine is called The Narcissist’s Almanac.)

It had never occurred to me that my mother would feel threatened by my children, but maybe it should have.

The teen years are funny – in many ways, your children want you out of their lives. They want to flex their grown-up muscles and experiment and get away with things.

And yet they want you around at the same time – at arm’s length, but available nonetheless. They want you to be friends with their friends’ parents and show up to the soccer games and go to the parents’ nights. And, apparently, to micromanage the college applications. Close, but not too close. Involved, but not too involved.

The height of conflict with my girls coincided, perhaps not surprisingly, with the onset of menopause. Changes in hormones affect your mood, your body, your comfort level. It’s not your fault, it’s biology. But as far as the kids are concerned, it’s your fault.

Of course, the timing was such that they were probably undergoing their own hormonal changes just as they mocked mine. It was a perfect storm.

I would get hot in a room and start peeling off layers, and I’d catch the girls rolling their eyes at each other or stifling a laugh. If I was irritable – and rollercoaster hormones do make you irritable – I got a lecture. ‘Mum, you’re impossible to live with,’ they’d say.

My own mother changed the energy in every room she entered, but that just wasn’t the way people talked back then. I, on the other hand, had raised my kids to express their opinions without fear of judgment.

Their opinions, it turned out, were basically: ‘Mum’s a pain in the ass.’ At least for a short but memorable time, I admit that was the case.

They said it with such disdain, and it was all I could do not to lecture them on the physiological changes of the 50-something female. Their time would come!

• Adapted from Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old by Brooke Shields (£25, Piatkus), out on January 14. © Brooke Shields 2025. To order a copy for £21.25 (offer valid to 25/01/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.