The first TikTok was their idea. Brooke Shields was in the Wake Forest dorm room of her youngest daughter, Grier, on freshman move-in-day. Grier and her sister Rowan—a senior at the university—told their mom they said they wanted to film something.
They launched into the concept: The actor would ask the kids if she was finally an empty nester. When they responded, she’d sprint out of the room in a joyful bid for freedom. Shields was hesitant.
She had mixed feelings about leaving them. But after some encouragement, she agreed. The TikTok got more than four million views.
The second viral TikTok, however? All hers. Days after drop off, she sat alone on her porch, hit with her solitude. “It just overwhelmed me, the finality of it—that this was definitely a rite of passage,” Shields tells Vogue .
So she took out her phone and began filming. She’d cried when they said goodbye, she admitted, and then for most of the car ride home. And right now? She was just having a really hard time with it all.
“I was feeling completely self-absorbed about it,” Shields says, laughing, weeks later. But then she gets serious: “I was just being honest about the gut-wrenching feeling when you watch them get smaller in the rearview mirror. It rips your heart out.
” It struck a chord. Close to two million people watched the clip on TikTok. Two million more watched it on Instagram.
Thousands flooded the comment section sharing their own stories. “Oh Brooke, it’s so so hard. It’s the end of an era and now you get to start a new chapter.
But first you need to cry. A lot. I laid on my couch for 3 weeks and couldn’t speak to anyone,” wrote Debra Messing.
Whereas mommy-influencers are dime a dozen, Shields is leading the charge in the new frontier of empty-nest-TikToking. It’s a complicated niche. After decades of intense, over-involved child-rearing, your role as a primary caretaker abruptly comes to a close.
“I told you when to sleep, when to wake up, what to wear, what not to wear, what to eat, when to eat. You have this utter control,” Shields says. “All of a sudden, here they are as full-fledged young women.
It’s beautiful to see—and yet, it’s really melancholy. It's not just about being needed..
.you love them, and you just miss them. Then you see them having fun and it's mixed.
Because you think, ‘Oh my God, they don’t need me. What am I going to do?’” And then, as Shields realized, it was whatever the hell she wanted. Weeks after crying on her porch, Shields posted another video of her jean shorts, excitedly declaring that she was home alone.
Then, she and her dog Tuzi snuggle on the couch while watching television. In addition to the uninterrupted T.V.
time, Shields has been indulging in the following: Going to bed at 10 p.m. and waking up when she feels like it; visiting a friend’s house and staying as long as she wanted; going on dates—multiple dates—with her husband; working long hours on her own projects! “There is something about your time becoming your own again.
I don’t have to check to see what their plans are, so that I can navigate my day around them. Once you have children, your whole life is tied to these people that have schedules, and you need to dictate what those schedules are. There’s play dates and homework and manners and all of this stuff, ” she says.
That’s not to say the role of “mom” is over. Far from it—now, it’s reached a phase where all parties involved are adults. “It's learning an entirely new language and there's a whole new set of rules,” she says.
Recently, Shields, Grier, and Rowan have been finding a common thread. Both girls raided her closet before going to Wake Forest. It wasn’t the designer items they wanted (although Shields still can’t find a pair of her Hermès slides), but her vintage T-shirts: They took a Harley Davidson baby tee, and another with a Keith Haring sketch.
Grier made national news when borrowed Shields’s wedding dress from her marriage to Andre Agassi for her graduation. A few years ago, a girl approached Shields in a Starbucks. Could they show her a picture? Shields obliged, thinking maybe someone had dressed as her for Halloween, or that they once had similar eyebrows.
(She gets a lot of pictures of eyebrows.) Instead, they showed her a car with a sign on the windshield: For Sale. Previously owned by Brooke Shields .
She laughed it off at first–like that was any selling point for a used car. But, as she went to get her coffee, she found turning around. Could she take another look? It was the same make and model—a Mercedes 380SEC.
But it was a bumper sticker that said that did it in: “I Love Gstaad.” In the eighties, she visited the Swiss Mountain town. In what she admits now is “probably a pretty douchey move” she bought the sticker and slapped it on the back of her Mercedes.
The seller was right—this was her car. She got their number and bought the car back. The “I Love Gstaad” car is with the girls in North Carolina now.
They’ll share it down at school, driving it to get their own coffees with their friends or doing whatever college kids do in between classes. It’s a concept that gives Shields peace: “I have this image of these two young women, walking to my old high school car and starting their lives. It was so heart-wrenching, but it was also full circle and sweet.
If you’ve done it right, they’ll thrive,” she says..
