There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me (2 page)

The obituary’s author highlighted—completely out of context—the most salacious facts and quotes. He painted her as a desperate single mom who sold her daughter into prostitution and nudity for her own profit. He even distorted Mom’s most famous quote, mistaking her wry humor for deep abuse—“Fortunately, Brooke was at an age where she couldn’t talk back.” This quote referred to the fact I’d
been eleven months old when I shot my first ad, for Ivory soap, not to human trafficking of a minor into the sex trade.

Who the fuck did this guy think he was to write about a woman he never knew? How could he hurl such vicious allegations when an obit was supposed to be fact based? The piece was shocking and of the lowest common denominator, which was especially terrible coming from somebody who called himself a reputable journalist.

Reading the obit, I felt myself beginning to lose it. I started to take deep breaths, trying not to panic or pass out. I ran into the kitchen and began pacing around the table as I sobbed and rambled: Why are they so cruel? Why can’t they let her be? Why can’t they let her die without being nasty? Why can’t they be kind to her just once? Why was it so easy and acceptable for him to degrade her? Where was the human decency? Someone’s mother just died.

I walked in circles, crying and choking on my tears, and then left the kitchen and walked up the stairs to my bedroom. I bawled my eyes out and ranted for only a few minutes longer. Then I began to sense the rage. It was like a hot liquid traveling up my legs and all the way to my cheeks and actually radiating from my face.

The anger was terrible, but then I took a step back mentally and thought: Who is this guy? What is it about his own life and parental dynamic that caused him to write with such ignorance and venom? Why the drive to assassinate the character of a woman of whom he had no personal recollection, and whose path he had never crossed? What did she symbolize to him?

If this dead seventy-nine-year-old woman could elicit such a vehement response and vicious reaction so many years after her prominence in the public eye had faded—never mind that a man who had never been a mother or a daughter penned it—there was something there that needed to be explored. The relationships between mothers and their daughters are often fraught and fascinatingly complicated. I knew mine was. But what did she trigger in him? Why did he care?

Almost immediately, I knew what I wanted to do. It was time to tell our story—my mother’s and my own. The story of my mother’s trajectory through her life and through mine. The story of how I became who I am because of all she was.

This book is about everything that went into being Teri Shields. It is not a
Mommie Dearest
tale. But I’m not holding her up on a pedestal, either. There has been so much written about my mom, and most of it has been quite negative. This is by no means an attempt to idealize her or condemn her. It is simply my turn to tell the story as I saw and felt it. It’s about the forty-eight years that I knew—yet never really knew—my mother.

My life—those forty-eight years of it—always existed somehow in relation to hers. She affected everything in my life. She was at the apex of it all. Nearly everything I did was for her, in response to her, because of her, or in spite of her. I was either emulating her or trying to define my independence from her. I was either trying to escape her or crash into her.

I thought about her all the time. She was part of my every day. Even though I worked hard and succeeded at creating a healthy private life and home with my grounded husband and beloved daughters, as long as she was alive, Mom’s needs were never far away.

I remained preoccupied by her until she passed away. And afterward as well, obviously, because I am writing about her every day.

As a child, I literally couldn’t imagine life without her. I used to think that if Mom died, I’d die, too.

Now I’m still here, with two daughters of my own, and this book is about understanding what came before, and what comes next.

Part One

My feelings about my mother and about our relationship are so confused that to write them down with clarity would mean I had them all figured out, which I do not.

—Brooke Shields’s diary

Chapter One

Teri Terrific

W
ho was my mother? I believe that I knew her better than anybody else did. And I didn’t know her at all. I could wax philosophical and venture to say that my mother never fully knew herself, and that the persona she created became her reality. She saw herself the way she wanted others to see her and built up the necessary barricades between her real character and what she presented. She made it impossible for even her daughter to chisel past the myth.

For years, I thought she was the strongest, most honest and forthright woman ever. Looking back, I see that she was the most truthful white liar I will ever know.

I understand a great deal about my mother and about her complex nature, but there were facts hidden, brushed over, and manipulated. There was information lost in translation and lost to booze. And there was much sadness and pain and deep insecurity. I have always felt that to really know another person, it requires a certain willingness to be vulnerable. Vulnerability equaled weakness in my mother’s eyes.

I have asked myself these questions: How well did I know Mom? How deeply do any of us really know our mothers? And how well do they really know us?

Ultimately, how much of who I am is my mother? Do I have to know her better to know myself?

•   •   •

Of course, there is a lot I do know. There are stories, the ones she told me and the ones I heard from others. And pictures—so many pictures! They tell a story all their own.

I know that my mother, Theresa Anna Lillian Schmon, was born in Newark, New Jersey, on August 11, 1933. She had an older brother and a younger sister, who was the apple of my mom’s eye. Mom was a perfect example of a middle child. She overcame her low self-esteem by rebelling and being a trailblazer. I smile thinking of her as a sweet but tough little kid whose attitude and humor made her a survivor. I am proud of my mom as a little girl. But for the most part, when I think about what I know of my mom’s childhood, I just feel sad.

Evidently her mother, also named Theresa, was forced to stop going to school at nine years old to become the primary caregiver of her three siblings. My grandmother’s mother had passed away, and she became an instant mother to three kids. Later on, she lost her younger brother to a freak drowning accident in Newark. I can only imagine the guilt and anger that comes from losing a sibling at such a young age and while on your watch. While researching my genealogy at the Newark History Society, I found a microfiche document that reported that in addition to these children, my grandmother’s father had an entirely different family he was supporting on the other side of town. I am not sure if my grandmother ever found out about her father’s double life, but I have a feeling that all these circumstances of her own life had to take a toll. This must be where her hardened personality began to develop. My grandmother was always a cold person in my eyes and would often throw out barbs about Mom. She
resented her for something, and I saw it when we visited. Grandma never credited my mother for the things she had given her but instead gave acknowledgment to her other daughter. I guess she resented my mom for leaving her instead of staying and caring for her forever. If I did something annoying when we were visiting, her idea of a perfect insult would be to say, “Ugh, you’re just like your mother!”

I took this as a compliment and thanked her. She’d then scoff at me, saying I was a sarcastic brat. One day Grandma offered to show me her dentures. I sat on her lap and grabbed her front teeth with my thumb and index finger, and she told me to pull. I did and her teeth came out in my hands. I burst into tears and thought I had ripped her head apart by the jaw. She laughed hysterically.

Eventually, when my grandmother grew up, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. She met and married John Schmon. They had three children: Johnny, Louise, and my mother, Teri. My mother’s name was originally spelled the same way as her mother’s, but she was forced to change the spelling because there were too many other Terrys and Theresas in her grammar school class.

•   •   •

As a child, Mom was left on her own a great deal and learned to be quite independent. She was a very cute little brunette with huge, dark-brown eyes. In pictures her eyes always stood out because of how dark and round her pupils were. She was a sweet, silly, and popular little girl who had an honest sense of humor. In first grade the teacher once asked the class why they thought that their area of Newark was nicknamed the Ironbound section. Mom raised her hand and exclaimed that it was because they were so tough!

Mom’s father drove a bus. Her mom got a job at a doughnut shop and was the one who filled the doughnuts with the cream and the jelly.
She evidently ended up getting fired for filling the doughnuts with too much jelly. She had other jobs but was basically a stay-at-home mom. It was the Depression, and it wasn’t uncommon for women to work various jobs in pastry shops and the like or to clean houses. Even my mother worked, cleaning houses in Newark starting at a very young age.

Mom told me that before Easter one year she really wanted a little chick she had seen in the window of a toy store. The chick cost only two cents, but her mom would not give her the money for something so frivolous. Mom told me she cleaned houses after school for two weeks straight to make the two cents. But by the time she got to the store to buy it for herself, it was closer to Easter and the price had been raised to three cents. She never got the chick.

But she was always smart and ingenious. At about age seven, she
did make a dollar by sending in an idea to a soap factory. Her idea was to layer in decals in the center of the soap to encourage kids to bathe. They couldn’t see the next fun decal until they washed the layers of soap away. She sent in a handwritten note to the company, and they sent her back a thank-you and a one-dollar bill. She claimed the company went on to make the soap and make a great deal of money from her invention. Mom gave her mother the dollar.

She was imaginative and adventurous, too, and her inventive way of thinking ended up giving me confidence to think outside the box and trust that my thoughts were unique. Of course, she was also OK with causing a little trouble, even then. When she was a very little girl, probably around four or five, she would run away from home and sneak into the movie theatre by getting on her tippy-toes and craning her neck to declare to the ticket lady, “My mommy’s in there.” The lady would wave her on inside and never notice if she did or did not come back out. Once inside the safety of the un-air-conditioned theatre, Mom would settle into a seat in the middle row and get lost in the stories told on the big screen. This was around 1938, and according to my mother, it was in a time when movies played all day long and periodicals played in between the screenings. World news would be sandwiched in between movies like
The Adventures of Robin Hood
,
Holiday
, or
Bringing Up Baby
.