You're listening to I Choose Me with Jenny Garth. Hi, everyone, welcome to I Choose Me. This podcast is all about the choices we make and where they lead us. My guest today is a Hollywood superstar. Her career started when she was a tiny baby, and she has conquered just
so many obstacles in her life. She's known for Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, her breakout performance as Joey's crazy girlfriend on Friends, which led her to starring in her own sitcom, one of my favorite sitcoms, Suddenly Susan, where she killed it at comedy, and her most recent Netflix movie, Mother of the Bride. She is the subject of the documentary Pretty Baby Brookshields, which was a testament to how strong and smart she is, how much she has endured
in her long career that has spanned multiple decades. She is a mama, she's an entrepreneur. She's a badass. You guys, please welcome Brookshields to the I Choose Me Podcast. Thank you for being with.
Us, Thank you for having me.
I'll just jump right in. You've had some incredible highs in this business, but I have to admit, even considering all of that and loves. I love what you are doing and saying right now. You are out front helping to knock down these archic stereotypes that we should just be put out to pasture after fifty and never seen again after sixty. So you've partnered with GSK to help
people thrive at fifty plus. Let's talk about what people fifty plus need to be aware of when it comes to our health, specifically our immune system.
We have to become people have to really take their health in their own control and ask their doctors, ask their pharmacists about your risk for shingles, and about vaccination. There is so much that we are not made aware of, and we have to ask, and it's so important that we understand the statistics that ninety nine percent of those fifty years and older actually already have the virus that causes shingles inside their body. Okay, no, not all of them are going to get it, but by the same
token staggering. I didn't know that. I had no idea, so when I heard it, I was like good, no good, and so I partnered with j's k's Thrive at fifty plus campaign because that was the messaging that they really said to me. Was the most important for them, and the idea of really being proactive in this era of your life and being your own advocate. You know, a million about a million estimated people develop shingles in the US just per year, and it's painful and it's terrifying,
and it's disruptive and it is it. I have a friend who had to stop work for two weeks, and you know she's going to afford to do that. That wasn't you know, And it really read tavoc on her life. So to me, it's important in this era. When you talked about changing stereotypes. Part of how we do that we don't sit and just wait for a narrative to change. We start speaking about ourselves differently. We stop using words like aging or anti aging or dry or all these words.
I'm so synonymous with just being female over forty. Practically I'm fifty nine, So you know this is I'm definitely in the in the and according to you know, the stereotype, I got one foot in the grave. And that messaging was I don't want my daughters, and you have three daughters, right I do. Baby girls are always going to be your baby girls. Yes, I have a baby eighteen year old and a baby twenty one year old, and I want them to know that this is not the big scary
era of age. But we are armed with many positive things, many progressive ways that we can own our health, own our lives, and take a power that we are. The messages that we're not, we no longer have it, and I don't even think about taking it back. I just think about revealing it even more.
I heard you in an interview once say that you didn't feel fully in your body until you were in your forties. And I know that feeling firsthand. And I also know all that it takes to get to that kind of self discovery when you grow up in the business that we have grown up in and when you just want so much to be confident in just being you. Why did it take us so long to grow up and to truly love and value ourselves?
Okay, first of all, we're in a ridiculously demigrating and deridict being I can't even say the word industry. So first of all, our whole industry is based on comparison to look like that, or you're not enough of this, so you're not. That's just all about that it's negative and it gets drilled into us from a very young age. The thing that's amazing to me is this is every woman's flight. Really ours is played out on this ridiculous stage, and that comes with its own challenges. But it took
me until I was pregnant. Actually, as being pregnant, my body finally had a purpose aside from looking a certain way or being a certain standard or fitting into something or looking like so and so and so. That was a really important right of passage for me. And then just it started when I was forty. I just started to realize that I could do things on my own terms, that I didn't have to first go through the checklist of making sure I was being a good girl or
that everybody was going to like me. I went I started shifting the way I asked myself questions. And to me, that was the first step towards you know, again we say love our bodies. Well, there's stuff that's hang in a lot lower now that I wish wasn't. I wish I enjoyed it when it was higher, but I did not enjoy it when it was all in its perky place. And you know, I feel bad about that because I wasted some time for myself.
Yes, Yes, you wasted all that time loving yourself.
Yeah. And then you start to really see yourself as a whole, not as your waste size, or as a healthy person, as someone who is not afraid to take their their health and their own on their own terms and ask questions. Ask their doctors, ask their pharmacist. You can ask your pharmacist about everything from your risk for shingles, about vaccination, about anything. This is the period of time when we need to really self advocate.
I love that, and that's so true. I've always had a real level of respect for you, and I see you, and I see how you are someone who has always appeared I don't know if this is the case, but you always appeared to have had a sense of yourself, even during times in your early life when maybe you didn't have a lot of agency over what was happening. You didn't only survive, you excelled, and you had to
protect yourself. You had to protect your mother, then you had to protect yourself some more than you had to protect your girls. It takes someone who really understands who they are to be able to protect like that, and that is something when I see you, and when I think of you, that's what I think of.
Thank you on that is absolutely lovely and beautiful. I don't know how, but maybe it was because I started so young and my mother kept me away from so much of the industry, and I went to all regular grade schools and schools and high schools and college and all of that with just kids who were not in the entertainment industry. I don't know. I think that did
have a positive effect on me. I think I somehow learned at an early age that I didn't want them to win, and weakness would allow them to win, and so I sort of had to fake it till I made it because I would think, oh, no, I'm not going to I'm not going to let you. Whether whether I was terrified in betwe inside or not, I didn't want to let them know, and I didn't want to
let them get the best of me. And I think that I was so stubborn like that, even just as a little girl, and I had to protect my mother. Like you said, when you have to protect your mom, it's almost as all bets are off, even in a different way than your children. I mean, I'd kill for my children but there's something about protecting your mother source that causes you to have to be really creative in how you stay strong and really creative and how you
keep your feet planted. And I started ferreting out things that I knew people couldn't take away from me. Education, my really close friends from high school, those little things that were like my checkpoints to know that whenever I saw the craziness or the bad behavior that was I would say, that's all right, this is my home. And I think I think I was really lucky that I practiced that growing up, and over time the sense of
self materialized. It didn't take It wasn't easy, you know, it happened mentally through university or according to the way I would process information. You know, we're not taught to have opinions when we're nobody really asks us what we feel or think about something, whether it's a roll or a part or something. You know, you know this better than anybody, and so you get so used to not having a voice that it's kind of comfortable. It's familiar, you know, And so finding that I had my own
intelligence was a revelation. Then finding out that I had this body that would do something extraordinary, like have babies was like I couldn't believe my luck, you know, And I think just over time, you have to fight for it. And I don't know, I think I never even wanted to take drugs because I didn't want to be unaware, because I needed to be at the ready all time something comes at you here, you're ready for it, you know.
I mean, it's a hell of a way to have childhood, but eventually, you know.
Becoming natural right. Your work ethic and your drive also inspired me in my career and in my personal life. And I just kind of want to ask you what motivates you to keep reinventing yourself time and time again, because I know for me that's what it is. Like I look back now and I say, oh, there, that's where I was at a certain point in my life. But somehow, by the grace of whatever, I managed to turn that into something else, then something else, and then something else, until here we are.
Rejection failure.
And not wanting them you said before, not wanting them to win.
Yeah, And you know, you get enough of that, which is all the time you start thinking, Okay, well I can just sit here and stay in that place, or I can pivot enough to stay creative, but keep moving through. You know, you can argue whether it's forward or not. You know, who knows. But there's this pivot. You know, out of college I couldn't get it, couldn't get a
film job or a TV job. And I was like twenty pounds every year, bad haircut, and I was no longer the Brookshields that went into the university and I all of a sudden I came out and thought they were gonna like me because I was an educated actress and we know how Hollywood likes smart actresses. And I thought, oh, oh, oh, okay, well what can I do? And it became you know, can I write? Can I does theater open up for me? Does TV open up for me? Because I wasn't in
TV at that point. And so it's this idea of just not losing, just continuing to.
Move through, not giving up.
And also, you know, we worked hard when we were younger, and still to this day, I had a work ethic instilled in me by my mom. I mean, my daughter just recently did her third internship at a GMA and the first thing I said to was show up earlier, leave later, make yourself necessary. I don't care if you have nothing to do, buind something to do. Be proactive. I don't care if it's holding someone's head over the toilet, if they're puking and bringing them you know, anchor coffee,
or rewriting a script or you know, handing out. I don't know. It doesn't matter what it is. Keep your eyes and ears open and work hard, because that's the one thing that can't be taken away from you.
Oh true, did you ever feel at any point in your life that you were like significantly stuck in that before the pivot?
Definitely? First of all, I've got to say, your voice is so soothing, and when I hear mine, I feel like it's grating oks And then.
You start talking like, oh oh thanks.
Say this maybe it's a lovely thing. Thank you for being so beautiful presence. And every time I had to always go through that crying and angry and I'm worthless and I hate this and I'm never going to do it again, and I can't do it, and I'm all these things that I listened to, all my bad tames, and then I realized, oh this doesn't feel really good, so I better change my way of thinking. And distract myself by something else that I haven't been rejected by it.
So I think that that's the place that I felt the most stuck and did not see a way out, was through postpartum depression. That was that none of my old habits or approaches or beliefs had any place when I was experiencing that something like that. That flattened to me that nothing else had ever done before, nothing had ever undone me before, and this undid me.
I mean, it just goes against are as women what were. It's so shameful. I had it on my third daughter, and I know exactly yes, right, that's just I don't even know if I had it on the first or second, to be quite honest, because I was so out of my body at all times, just like functioning and continuing forward that I didn't really ever just like drop in and feel my feelings. I was just do do do? Do you know?
I know, yeah, I don't know. And it's not what we're told. We're told we have the baby handed to you, and your hair cascades down and the baby latches on look up and you're just it's bliss, and the birds flying around your head like that's the least why.
Yeah, it's not like that for It wasn't like that for me either.
Nope, And I think that you know, it's hard todn't feel like a failure, but we're so prone to feeling like failures as women. We're all we're told why it's our fault. And I believe me, I never even knew that I had this rather feminist approach to things and it's something against men, but I never I just my value. I never realized how threatened it was all the time. And then you have this biochemical situation with this something
that you're told is supposed to be so natural. And I was convinced I was a normal and you know when I was a huge failure and made a huge mistake and shouldn't have played God and all of this and all of that is unnecessary punishment for us.
You posted a video a couple of weeks ago, I think now about being an empty nester. I'm really close to that, and there's just such a mixed bag of emotions for me surrounding that big milestone. How is it? How are you adjusting?
So I'm thankful to my children for it, even telling me how to do trending tiktoks or maybe that was I'm not quite sure what it was, but whatever that was, they totally directed me in it. And that's that's the only way I get to do those things is if tell me I should do it, you know it. The second one is different than the first one because or the third, because it does leave a different type of emptiness and silence that it's just really unfamiliar. So I
think that that was sort of the first shock. But then they're thriving so much and they have each other.
That's you're so lucky.
But then you go through the fear of not being needed anymore, and therefore my worth is like well, what I mean, they're not crying and missing their mother like that. That's threatening, you know, And then you sort of like, you know, it's just you and the dog, and you're
kind of like, oh, this isn't so bad. Like I have time in a different way, to be ambitious, to do nothing, to be with friends, to say yes without checking for schedules and practice and basketball and parents and this, you know what I mean, Like there's this whole world of scheduling that I don't have to salt anymore.
Yeah, yeah, which is really a relief, certain freedom.
Got time.
It's your time to shine. Yeah, I have the twenty one and the eighteen year old. They're still at home with me, but I mean just watching them grow into these incredible, like self aware, driven young women is just the gift of life for me. And my daughters have
really held me up at certain times. Have you have you felt that and did you ever feel any like guilt or shame around that because you were supposed to be the one that has it all together, even though you're just going through everything for the first time yourself and learning as you go, Like I remember feeling like, wait, I'm supposed to be the strong mom here.
I mean, yes, absolutely, but it was It was interesting
the way it happened for me. My younger daughter was in a tizzy about something, and she was explaining to me what I where I was wrong and where but not really wronged her, but just where I was looking at the situation inappropriately and unnecessarily, And she just laid it into me with such clarity and no judgment, just and love, like there was love in her judgment, which is interesting, but it was true, and I just burst, I laughed, I burst out laughing, and she got madder
and mad her and she was like, why you're laughing, This is not funny. And I said, sweetheart, I hope and pray for you. If it's what you want. You always have to clarify everything now that if and when you choose or hope or blessed with having a child, they will one day turn around and teach you and it will shock your system and you will realize what a gift it is. And I said, you know what,
You're absolutely right. I was not acting in my best interest and my ego was driving me, and it was just it didn't it was about it was about wearing clothes, and believe it or not, it was about something absolutely frivolous. But the lesson was she had such clarity, and I thought.
This is I've done my job well enough so that they are their own people, so it's not threatening to me when they when when the.
Roles are reversed. I was relieved for my daughters that she was able to teach me and educate me.
Right at first, it's like a tough pill to swallow, like you're like, wait, what this is not okay? Rule reversal, But then I'm so grateful, like I feel like, oh, I've done something well, I've done something right.
Well that's the thing. You're like, how dare you be so right? And you're like, oh, and then it opens a conversation.
So it really does.
But it's like it's like with anything, you know. I Hey know when your girls first go to a gynecologist in there and they're all, you know, you no longer you're no longer going in there with them. Well, by the time we're the gynecologists and usually not but probably, I mean the conversation and you start teaching them to ask questions for themselves, ask questions. This is your body, You're able to do that. It's what it's what the
drive up if you plus campaign is about. It's like, it's every step of the way we have to learn that our bodies are our own and whatever that entails to you and be proactive. So it's all these messages that I never learned as a child and took me a long time to learn, and it took outside influences to help me learn that. I'm trying to save them a little time and pepper the pepper the information into their lives and hope they hope they hear it.
I love that I loved your documentary Pretty Baby. If anybody that's listening didn't see that, you should definitely go watch. It takes so much bravery to share yourself on that level. You opened up about some of your darker moments in your life, and I've found that riveting. And now I just want to know, like, with all that deeply personal information that you've shared out there in the open, how do you feel? Because I know after I've shared sometimes I feel like, oh no, how can I get that back?
I think you always feel what have I done? But going into it, I really I talked to the director and I said, look, I'm going to hand over all of my archives to you, and all I ask is that as you were watching through, as you were coming through this, that the narrative that you'd come up with is something bigger than me. Otherwise it's a true Hollywood story or worse, where are they now? And you know, and so you're like, oh God, but what I believe
this director did and I had to just trust. So that was and I will say I have been burned so many times by trusting that this was the ultimate trust. But I felt like it was time and it was appropriate, and she made this documentary about a larger conversation about the sexualization of young women, especially in our society, and it just broadened the view of one person's story. And I was the conduit to a bigger conversation. And that, to me, is the biggest gift of all.
Did your daughter see that that they see the reason that you did it?
One of them did, the other one did not. My younger one, Bob will forever be angry with me. I she was ambushed with the information. I just it was a bad, bad mom move on my part. I didn't set her up, and she doesn't like being surprised. She doesn't like me. She felt sort of cold cocked, and I just didn't. I assumed it would be fine. I thought, well,
she knows her mother. Her mother's healthy and not damaged, and you know, and I thought it would be she would be able to look at us now and think like, wow, you are You've come a long way, and isn't that great? And no, no, no, she said she will never be okay with it. She will never be okay with anything happening to me. And my older daughter really thought about it and said, well, it was tough. I don't need to see that again, but women need to see this.
So I think that period of maturity helped my older daughter to understand it differently. And I'm not sure where my my eighteen year old is gonna get any better. I don't know if she's good.
Maybe she'll get there maybe those years.
Well, I hope it's not through the hard way.
Yeah, don't we all? Before I let you go, Brookshields, what was your last I choose me moment?
So it's so menial and silly, that's okay. Over the weekend, I had so much to do. I had so many parents packing and unpacking and moving and work stuff and zooms. And I literally got a cup of tea, went out on the little swing on my small little front porch and I sat there for an hour and a half
and did things like strands, connections, needle point. I did this like all these things that were that I never really do, and they were just sort of mindless, and I felt like I had had a vacation or a massage after about an hour and a half, and that was I chose me for that hour and a half rather than waking up and going directly into chores and things that I had to do in Errand's so just choosing me in a quiet way was it was really was healing for me.
Yeah, sometimes it's just those moments that we need.
Sometimes it's staying before in the morning, binging some show. I mean like, sometimes I feel like I'm getting away with so much if I still to get up at six or seven the next day, But it doesn't matter because how quiet time is mine. And you know I used to feel guilty for that, and I don't anymore.
I love that. I've loved our conversation and I love what you're doing, and I just want to say thank.
You, thank you so much, good luck with your your latest, your last baby, and thank you.
I want to thank Brooke for coming on. She is such an inspiration to so many women that you can be anything you want, You can change and evolve as many times as you like in this lifetime. And I love that as we continue to choose ourselves each week, I want you to try a little self care. Okay, when was the last time you had a bubble bath or got a massage or sat on your porch. My favorite form of self care is usually sitting outside like Brooke, just enjoying nature and turning off my mind from all
that is going on up there. I also love bubble baths, so maybe you'll find me in one later today. This week, I want you to put yourself on your calendar and have a little I Choose Me time with no guilt, no shame, because it is vital that we put ourselves first here and there. Thanks for listening to I Choose Me. You can check out all our SOLF links in our show notes, and you can rate us and review us, and tell me things that I really want to hear, and even tell me things that maybe I don't want
to hear. Use the hashtag I Choose Me. I'll be right here next week. I hope you will choose to be here too,