She also lost something. Parents who had been her legal guardians were released from their financial obligations. They were no longer legally required to support her. The protection of parental obligation, whatever it had looked like in practice, was formally withdrawn.
In Drew Barrymore’s case, the mechanisms that led to the court hearing were somewhat unusual in that they involved a degree of institutional consensus. Mental health professionals who had worked with her during her hospitalization concluded, according to accounts that have circulated in various forms since Wildflower was published, that she would be better served by living independently than by returning to the household environment that had contributed to her situation. This was not simply a matter of Drew herself requesting independence; it was, in part, a clinical and professional judgment that the existing family structure was insufficient for her needs.
Jaid Barrymore, in an outcome that Drew has described with a kind of painful ambivalence, supported the petition. She attended the court hearing. She agreed that her daughter should become legally independent. In Wildflower, Drew’s memoir published in 2015, she wrote that she was sad — that her mother’s support for the emancipation, which might have seemed like a kind and supportive gesture, registered instead as a kind of abandonment. The mother who was releasing her was also, on some level, the mother who hadn’t been able to hold on.
The judge, in Drew’s account of the hearing, asked her directly: “I can turn the clock forward, but I can never turn it back. Are you ready for that?”