Brooke Shields Is Heartbreakingly Honest About the Pain of Being an Empty Nester

"I cried a good portion of the ride home.”

Brooke Shields just got very real about the realities of being an empty nester. The actor took to Instagram to share a heartbreakingly honest video in which she shared her experience of dropping her younger daughter, Grier, off at college.

“I sat here a year ago and I watched my big girl leave, and I’m back on this porch and I am now officially an empty nester and my little girl...” she said, trailing off as she teared up behind her tinted sunglasses.

Shields' younger daughter, Grier Henchy, has just started at Wake Forest University in North Carolina where her older sister, Rowan Henchy, is already a student. As Shields said, "They're together, at least."

"It’s not easy for the moms,” she went on, wiping away her tears. "I mean, it’s just so weird. So weird that she’s not here.”

Shields had just dropped her daughter off at college. "It was really hard and then she started crying,” Shields said of their farewell. “Then I really started crying. And then I cried a good portion of the ride home. I’m an empty nester… Wow."

Shields previously revealed that she wasn't ready for her younger daughter to head off for college earlier this summer. "You think you’re ready for it, and then people say, ‘Oh you’re gonna have freedom.’ I just…I don’t know. I’m not really prepared for it," she said on Good Morning America in June.

She also opened up about the struggle to People in May, saying, "The thought of no longer living 24/7 in the house with these people, that I've raised, it's just a very foreign … it's like going to a totally foreign territory,"

Shields is incredibly close with her two daughters, Rowan and Grier. "The minute my husband is on any type of work trip or gone or something, you know, they still sleep in the bed with me," she said on SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Show in May. "We still watch rom-coms. They're my babies and they will never not be." Earlier this year, she and Grier got matching mother-daughter tattoos for Mother's Day. Plus, Grier has been known to dip into her mother's closet from time to time (and who can blame her).

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