There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me

by Brooke Shields

  I would get impatient and raise my voice, saying, “Mom, what do you want to eat?”

  I would then just pick for her and apologize to the server out of embarrassment for my mother’s lack of focus. I felt mortified that she was acting like a little kid and I was ashamed of my own impatience. Later, Rowan would stick up for Toots and tell me not to be mean to her, scolding me.

  Other strange things happened as well. Chris came into the kitchen one afternoon and saw my mother place a ceramic bowl of soup onto an open flame on the stove. He stopped her and said, “Teri, that should be in a metal pot.”

  “I know but it’s faster this way. Take out the middleman.”

  Luckily, he managed to avert disaster by offering to help and, in fact, serve her. This soup incident sent up our first warning sign. This was beyond my mother’s normal eccentric nature.

  Soon after that, I decided to get rid of my entire set of Fiestaware dishes and cups that Mom and I had collected over the years at various flea markets. I now wanted clean, uniform-looking china. I went to Sur La Table and bought simple white bowls and plates and mugs. As I was taking the stickers off the bottoms of the mugs it occurred to me that this task might be something my mother could help me with. She was thrilled that I asked for her help. She stood at the kitchen island and began peeling off the tiny SKU labels from the bottom of the pieces.

  I watched her out of the corner of my eye and was sadly fascinated by the precision with which she picked away at the edges with the tip of the painted red nail of her index finger. She moved slowly and with focused concentration, and added each little sticker to a mounting pile stuck to the marble top of the counter. She reminded me of the autistic children I had studied temporarily after I graduated from college as research for a part in a shitty movie I did. She was at first quiet and seemingly content, but she could not seem to finish the job. I kept watching her while pretending to do other things. She skipped some stickers and labored over others, and then would get distracted and forget she was working on a task at all. A task that should have taken fifteen minutes took over two hours and was completely disorganized.

  Watching her inability to complete any seemingly simple task spurred deep curiosity in me. Was she brain damaged from a ministroke she had suffered a few years back? Was the hematoma that I had seen and touched at St. Vincent’s when I received the dead turtle more damaging than I thought, or was excessive alcohol all to blame?

  I tried another kitchen task. I asked Mom to set the dining room table with the new flatware I had also just ordered. I gave her enough for twelve settings. Now, it had been my mother who had taught me the proper way to set a formal dinner table. She was from Newark but she made sure she was skilled in proper etiquette. I learned from a young age which utensil went where and why. Mom disappeared into the dining area to set the table. We were not having a dinner, but I did not tell her that. She was gone for about two hours. When I checked in on her, nothing she’d done made sense. She could not seem to finish the job. I can’t say I handled it well. I would like to be able to write that I calmly helped her and encouraged her like I would a child. I did not. I got disgusted and impatient and used the moment to chastise her and shame her. I was striking back and felt ugly and ashamed but I could not stop this lashing out.

  “Seriously, Mom, you can’t even set a table. Really?”

  She got that terrible wide-eyed—scared, cornered, and broken—look in her expression and she went still again. Instead of lashing back or cursing at me as I had seen so many times, she looked like a little kid being shamed by her mommy. I was not proud of my behavior but felt so pouty and bratty. I wanted to stamp my feet and cry, “It’s not fair!”

  It was as if I had reverted to that little brat from Mom’s return from St. Mary’s.

  It is a very unsettling feeling to see your parents really helpless and vulnerable. I was so frustrated that I had taken care of her my whole life, and that now, when the big dramas seemed to have subsided, it felt even worse. I was getting angry that when I had thought she might have finally settled down a bit and had finally become a sweet or calmer grandma, she now seemed impaired and even more helpless. The promised land I believed in had never materialized and now we were in a different kind of hell. What had it all been for?

  Something was not right in her head. Was her brain pickled by booze? Or was it something else?

  Part Five

  I will always be your daughter and you my mother even if the manifestation of that is not what either of us dream of.

  —Card to Teri from Brooke

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tag Sale

  Life around my mother began to be even more unsettled and intense, but for entirely new reasons. I was beginning to get worried and sad because alcohol was seriously beginning to be the least of my worries. For forty years my focus had been on her drinking. Now I almost wished that the booze was the problem. My chest would tighten every time I saw the look of fear on her face when she was asked a question. She looked like a little kid in a foreign land having been separated from her mommy.

  Chicago went well and I finished my run just as my belly was beginning to look like I was hiding half a soccer ball in it. I told my mother I was pregnant and called her again when I heard my daughter’s heartbeat. Mom cried this time, too.

  It was about this time that I really began to feel distant from my mom. When I had Rowan I was still so enmeshed with my mother, but with this baby I felt a new level of freedom. I am not sure what to attribute this liberation to, but I really just started to feel like I was finally growing up. Time had passed since my dad’s death. I didn’t care, honestly, if my mom drank or not. And I was about to have two children under the age of three. Life was shifting.

  Sadly, the realization dawned on me that I was becoming a mother at the same time I was beginning to lose my own. I am reminded of the fact that in every Disney movie from Bambi to Frozen the mothers all are dead or die within the first few minutes. Is that what it takes to start your own story? One’s narrative morphs with one’s current perspective of the truth. But must one’s mother die for a person to fully individuate?

  I started getting the heavy feeling that it was too late for my mom to ever really be happy and for me to make up for the time I had lost whenever she was drunk.

  Maybe when I blurted out “If you die, I’ll die” all those years ago I was onto something. Maybe a part of me would have to die to continue. I used to honestly feel that if Mom died I would actually stop living. Now I had my own children to live for and I had my own life to fully live.

  It started getting very sad to me when I realized I was actually, slowly, losing my mother and there was little to be done about it. I felt like I had lost her my entire life. I had fought for her and had fought against her for so many years and was not sure what I had to show for it. She was fading just as I was beginning to come into focus.

  • • •

  Mom was mostly living in her new condominium in New Jersey. It was becoming evident that this would probably not last long. It was getting harder and harder for her to take care of herself. She was starting to show real signs of forgetfulness and she began speaking less and even more quietly. She was hardly drinking and when she did it wasn’t to excess. I had actually given up trying to get her to quit drinking. In fact, I began to pour her wine like I would for anybody else at the table. Why not? I had contacted lawyers and begun the legal process of being designated her health and legal proxy. It was evident Mom was on a path toward being declared incompetent with regard to her personal care. She had a couple of friends who’d drive her places and I’d arrange any other necessary travel. I was no longer worried she could drive, and I just had to make sure she didn’t hurt herself by accident in some way while unattended.

  I visited her when I could. In my spare time I continued to go through her storage units to take inventory and sell some more ite
ms to help her pay her bills. Over the course of our lifetime together Mom and I had owned six homes. There was a period where we owned them all at the same time! Once I convinced my mother to start unloading some real estate so as to maintain some financial liquidity, we suddenly had more furniture than we could ever use. That did not stop her from buying more. Mom often bought furnished houses, but every time she sold a house, she kept its contents. My mom could never part with a thing. After the collection expanded out of several storage units, my mother ended up renting a warehouse in Paterson, New Jersey, that was literally the size of an airplane hangar. She filled it top to bottom and had been paying rent on it for years.

  The big problem, however, was the actual manner in which Mom stored her treasures. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it and hardly anything was marked. The boxes were stacked on top of each other, reaching up as high as the ceiling. She had clothes, linens, silverware, fabric, jewelry, more clothes, books, art, film reels, bikes, toys, tools, stereo equipment, countless rugs, built-in cabinets she had ripped out from places, machinery of sorts, Hollywood memorabilia, and furniture galore. Most of it was real quality. But who needed four rolltop desks or the built-in cabinetry from our town house on Sixty-Second and Lexington Avenue? My assistant Dan started helping me sort through everything. We never knew what we would find, but you knew there would be a story attached.

  For example, she had two wardrobe-size cardboard boxes chock-full of Beanie Babies. She had become one of those people who collected them with the plan of cashing in one day. She never traded or sold them, though, but simply kept buying hoards of the little ridiculous stuffed animals. The whole thing creeped me out. But I had learned to pick my battles. Either they would sell or I would find a place to donate them.

  I thought I would donate the boxes to a children’s hospital but was told they could not take stuffed animals because of the germs. I then found out that my aunt Lila knew somebody who would fill a suitcase and bring it to children in developing countries. She could only take one suitcase, however, and would not be making another trip for months. I decided to rummage through the boxes before separating them to be sold. My assistant thought it was a waste of my time. They were obviously just boxes full solely of Beanie Babies.

  I explained to him that he did not really know my mother. Something told me I needed to go through all of them. Well, at the bottom of one of the wardrobe boxes was a little piece of crumpled-up tissue. Inside said tissue was a 14-karat gold, diamond-encrusted Harry Winston watch. Mom had always hidden things places and then forgot where they were. I found lose semiprecious stones in dental-floss containers and a 24-karat gold purse inside another flea market clutch. There were real Louis Vuitton and Chanel bags mixed in with knockoffs, and I had to beg Dan to go into their stores and ask for help telling the difference between them. I don’t think it was about fear of theft as much as she was just eccentric and loved being in control. Mom would go to all lengths for a laugh or just to have something over on somebody.

  • • •

  In April 2006 our second daughter, Grier Hammond Henchy, was born. Now I had two daughters under the age of three. Even though Grier was born in LA, we had decided that when she started school we would move the girls back to New York and get their education in Manhattan. I had always wanted to have my girls have a New York City upbringing. Mom had been making reckless decisions—like letting a guy who worked at the gas station move into her living room. She was found wandering barefoot and confused around a school parking lot.

  We decided it was time to move her to an assisted-living facility.

  Mom went willingly, but when she arrived she hated it because she was not like “these people.” It was just like it was back in rehab all those years ago. The way she saw it, she was never as bad as the other people in these places. The tough part for me was that Mom really didn’t look as old as the other residents. They all actually did seem older and more out of it than she did. She didn’t mumble as much as they did and had not begun to shuffle with her socked feet wedged into bedroom slippers.

  As soon as she was checked in she started asking me when she could leave. I have to admit that although it was a relief to have her accounted for, I felt terrible that she needed such a place. I felt guilty for “putting her away.” She used to love to paint the picture to people of her being eventually locked up and me sliding a tray of food to her under the door. “Peter and the tray,” she called it, reminding me of the Peter-like betrayal she’d always expected.

  I justified it all by saying to myself that it was temporary. I secretly felt she was somehow superior to the others. I thought she would snap out of it. She had to. It couldn’t end like this.

  Having her in a facility gave me the freedom to handle the sale of her homes and have tag sales for the excess crap. I discovered that she had been shopping on QVC and HSN for copious amounts of jewelry. She had burned through money I had allotted her over the years and had even siphoned from a retirement fund. There were hundreds and hundreds of little boxes and bags filled with birthstone rings and earrings. I had never seen so many cubic-zirconia items in one area. She bought in bulk and had intended to give it all away to friends and employees and one of each to her granddaughters. It was insane. In addition she had various collections of everything from taxidermy, vintage record players, quilts, tiles, antique doors, or orange crates filled with door fittings. She had milk-glass table settings, Depression-glass collections, rugs, sterling-silver settings for twelve, over a thousand vintage tablecloths, assortments of paint-by-number art mixed in with period oil portraits, bolts of fabric, multiple pieces of antique furniture, and unfinished crafts from the seventies.

  I had to sort through it all and decide what to do with it. I basically kept the good stuff and put the rest up for sale. We had three massive two-day tag sales to rid ourselves of the clutter. We made a good chunk of money on these sales and the money went directly to her living costs.

  One day I called to speak to my mother and they said she had gone out with a male friend. My mother had two friends at this point and I was one of them. The other was an accountant’s assistant who had been helping Mom pay bills. She was a woman.

  I asked with whom she had gone out and to where, and why had they not called me?

  They said that a man came to visit her and that Mom seemed to know him, so she left with him. The jailbreak had been a success. He was not on the accepted list of visitors and these idiots had no idea that they were allowing my mother to be checked out by a National Enquirer reporter. My head exploded with rage.

  This bozo snuck Mom directly to the bank, at her request, and she had tried to take out money. I actually guessed she would go back to Haworth, because she maintained her account there and was always talking about money and being stolen from. She wanted to flee and this was her ticket to escape. I hung up on the numbnut attendant at the facility and immediately called the bank and asked if my mom was there. They informed me that yes, she was. A man in fact had accompanied her. She was trying to withdraw money from her account at that moment.

  I explained in an agitated tone that this man was not a friend and had basically kidnapped her. I begged them to please not release any funds, saying that she had been under psychiatric observation and was currently living in an assisted-living facility. I had no legal right, technically, to stop anything, because the account was in her name. I made a dramatic, agitated, yet crystal-clear case and explained that my mom was not of sound mind and would do something damaging with any money. They agreed to deny her access this time but would need more documentation on the legal restrictions, which were already being prepared.

  I thanked them profusely and said I would get the paperwork ASAP. I had by then known these bank clerks, policemen, and mailmen for over twenty-five years.

  Mom got very angry that she was denied access to her account and stormed off. The bank had said it was some paperwork mix-up a
nd told her to ask her daughter to help. The slimeball reporter next took Mom to a diner, where she proceeded to blab all about her horrible daughter over a cheeseburger. She told the dramatic details of how I “divorced” my own mother and stole everything from her. She went on a tirade about evil Perry and how he had brainwashed me. She loved saying I had basically joined the Agassi cult. Mom painted herself as a true victim and me as the ultimate betrayer. “Hiya, Peter!”

  He took copious notes and had the story of a lifetime. America’s Sweetheart was actually a Daughter Dearest! He had gotten everything he wanted, and Mom loved being able to vent and be heard. She felt wronged in every way and was letting the world know the “truth.” He dropped her back at the facility with the same ease with which he had had her removed.

  I moved her out of the facility the next day and sued the Enquirer. I won the case and gave the money to Alzheimer’s research. The story was blocked and I was ultimately protected.

  Because of the wandering situation and the trust in strangers, as well as her mounting paranoia, I had Mom analyzed and consequently declared incompetent. My request to become legally affirmed her health proxy and guardian was thus immediately facilitated. Once again I was taking care of her, but this time it was out of necessity, not obsession. I tried to be up-front about it with her but was worried she would feel like I was trying to find more ways to betray her and steal from her. She seemed not to grasp anything that I tried to explain. Having more control made it much easier with regards to real estate sales and other legal decisions. I found another facility in New York City that specialized in patients with Alzheimer’s and the many other forms of dementia. It was located on the Upper East Side at Eightieth and York. It only took two trains to get to and was close to Mom’s and my old neighborhood.