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From apple pie to humble pie
Terry Hekker found fame in her native US as an icon of stay-at-home family values. But then her husband left her after 40 years and she now has a very different message Terry Hekker realised that she had been sadly wrong for all these years when she overheard a niece, expecting her first baby, answer the question of whether she would be going back to work. “Yes,” replied the niece, “because I don’t want to end up like Aunt Terry.”
Aunt Terry, now a 73-year-old grandmother with silver-blonde hair, deep, maternal bosom and a rumbling, smoky chuckle, was stunned to find herself cast as the prime family example of how not to lead your life.
A quarter of a century ago, Hekker had played a very different role. She had been America’s Mom, a media celebrity as she toured the lecture circuit and the television chat shows – on Oprah, even, when Oprah was on a local show in Baltimore – advocating the joys and satisfactions of homemaking, child-rearing and full-time, stay-at-home housewifery.
All this followed a punchy and opinionated article she had sent from her kitchen table to the New York Times, hitting back at the chorus of opinion that she was diminishing herself by staying at home. It was the late Seventies, when feminism was taken to the mainstream in glossy magazines, and women of a new generation were abandoning their cookers in droves.
The article became a book, Ever Since Adam and Eve, and Hekker found herself a champion of what are these days referred to as “family values”. Her five children and extended Irish-American clan – 72 for Thanksgiving dinner – lent her a special air of authenticity.
But how did Aunt Terry end up? Abandoned for a younger woman, divorced, broke, scared and angry. She felt like an old, discarded kitchen appliance.
“I got it wrong,” Hekker now admits. “My book was an anachronism even when I wrote it. I wrote that original article to argue that my choice – to stay at home – was a valid one, and not to criticise working mothers.
“But that choice was valid only while the trust in my marriage held, and these days you plainly can’t rely on marriage. I think that is sad, but things have changed. The reality is that I have become a cautionary tale.”
Written by Charles Laurence Read page 2 of From apple pie to humble pie
This article was created: 7 August 2006.
This article was last edited: 14 February 2007.
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