Iconic actress Brooke Shields announced that she dropped off her oldest daughter, Rowan Francis, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., via a bittersweet Instagram post shared on Aug. 21, 2021.
Brooke, her husband, Chris Henchy, and their second daughter, Grier Hammond, were all present for the big occasion. As Brooke wrote, the trip was the saddest one she has ever had to make, but she was excited to see what the future held for her kid.
Brooke Shields and Chris Henchy share two kids.
Brooke and Chris — who have been married since 2001 — welcomed their first daughter, Rowan, on May 15, 2003. Rowan was followed by Grier Hammond on April 18, 2006. It’s understood that Brooke and Chris (who is the writer and producer of Impractical Jokers: The Movie, among many others), had been planning on starting a family for a while. Brooke opened up about her experiences with IVF and postpartum depression in her 2005 memoir, Down Came the Rain.
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“I was ready to go down in a ball of flames to become a mother,” Brooke told The Guardian in 2014. “It took seven rounds of IVF to get pregnant with my daughter Rowan. It made me a crazy person – I was so focused on having a child that I couldn’t see anything else. Totally selfish, but I needed to create a family for my own sanity.”
As Brooke emphasized in several interviews, she didn’t want her kids to have body image issues like she had — which is why body positivity has been a focal point for her as a parent.
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“They’re so much more mature than I was,” Brooke told Net-a-Porter in 2018. “So much more confident in their own bodies. They have the same stubbornness and strength that I do, but are more well-adjusted. I am jealous as all hell about that. But, of course, I created it.”
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An open-minded mom, Brooke even agreed to get a matching tattoo with her oldest one, Rowan, to celebrate her high school graduation in June 2021. They chose a ladybug pattern because of Rowan’s family nickname.
“When she was born, she just looked like two [big] eyes,” Brooke told People. “She just looked like a little bug, and that’s been her nickname ever since.”
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