Drew Barrymore made headlines when she won emancipation from her parents at the age 14. Her mom, Jaid Barrymore, an actress who took nine-year-old Drew to Studio 54 ("so wrong, but so fun," Barrymore wrote in her memoir, Wildflower) was in the courtroom when it happened.
"I'll never forget the judge saying, 'You never have to go to school again,'" Barrymore, 47, says in the latest issue of PEOPLE.
Over the years, the actress and talk show host was able to forgive her parents, even finding and paying for hospice care for her father, John Drew Barrymore, before he died of cancer in 2004. "He got kicked out of one of them, which is so true to him: Of course his rebellion got him kicked out," she says.
As a mother of two herself, Barrymore says she'll always be there for her mom if she needs her, too.
"I will always support her," she tells PEOPLE. "I can't turn my back on the person who gave me my life. I can't do it. It would hurt me so much. I would find it so cruel. But there are times where I've realized that our chemistry and behavior will drum up a feeling in me where I have to say, 'Okay, I need a break again.'"
The pair have established "a lot of boundaries," she says. "And we've taken many pauses in our lives. Healthy pauses, I'm like, friends need to do it, life-longers need to do it, this is where we're at."
Barrymore feels more confident in setting those limits today. "The more time goes by and the older I get, the less guilt and corrosive toxic shame and just absolute discomfort comes with it," she says. "The more you sort of go, 'My God I'm going to be 48, when does that guilty little girl that's still so sad that I don't have this amazing nuclear relationship with my family, when does that become okay?'"
She says she will always feel a "cosmic, magnetic pull" to her parents: "It comes with so much emotionality and so much sort of burning desire to get right or heal or figure out."
The host of The Drew Barrymore Show has spent a lot of time in therapy figuring it out, and she can also feel the pull of her family's craft. (Barrymore's grandfather, great-grandparents and great-uncle and -aunt were all renowned actors.) "I'm not trying to do this job because I feel any obligation. I think there is magic in genetics. I feel so compelled to do what they do," she says.
In fact, in her kitchen, a small TV is always tuned to Turner Classic Movies. "It is never not on because it's a portal," she says. "They come and visit me through it. I will be walking into the kitchen and there will be Lionel or John or Ethel or my dad. And I literally gasp for air."
