Apple pie moms watch out

From apple pie to humble pie

Part one: I was wrong

Part two: why women should work

Part four: the evolution of the family

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Sex and the married woman

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

The idea, however, that the plight Hekker so handily illustrates is all down to gender shifts in education and the employability of women in the post-industrial age is a little limited.

Scratch below the surface of Hekker’s writing, and a more basic and inflammatory theme emerges: sex.

“I was prompted to write that first article by the reaction people would have when I told them I was a stay-at-home mother,” she explains.

“They would talk loudly, avoid long words, and get away from me at the first opportunity. And by this time, I was starting to do a lot of errands for all those other mothers who did work. I didn’t have a problem with that, but I did not want to be seen as the lazy idiot who was always at home and therefore available.”

Hekker pauses and for a moment her eyes take on a faraway look. Jack died nearly two years ago, 11 years after their divorce, and she is pointedly dressed from head to toe in black.

“At one party I remember seeing all these men clustered around a pretty girl in a fetching, low-cut dress,” she goes on.

“She was a modern working girl, of course. But do you know what her job turned out to be? She was a toll collector. Just how glamorous is that? The truth is that all those men were put
off by my nursing bras!” This might have made at least as profound a theme for Ever Since Adam and Eve.

As Hekker talks of the years when her marriage seemed to her pretty much like the Garden of Eden, it becomes obvious in a shy, coded sort of way that she was having a wonderful time as a woman.

Not for her the “101 ways to have an orgasm” of the monthly headlines in say, the Cosmopolitan magazine of the time, but rather the old-fashioned joys of making babies.

As she charts her route to the Hudson Valley suburbs where the family settled in a vast, eight-bedroom house with rec-room and swimming pool, she tells this story: “We started off in a flat above the garage of my Dad’s house when he managed a hotel, but one day my Dad, who could be rough, came up to Jack to say we were crowding the place out with too many kids." Hekker simply squeals with joy at the memory.

And when after the traumas of her divorce she finds herself lamenting lost love with a group of women in similar straits, they agree that one cause of their rejection was their inability to perform “tasks we’d either never learnt or couldn’t perform without laughing”. Even today, she believes her marriage should have lasted until the end.

Of course there were problems, but in her mind none was anywhere near the scale to break the bonds of love and trust.

The family had ridden the wave of American affluence, and had done well. Jack Hekker was a lawyer and they had become a prominent couple in Nyack, an outer suburb on the Hudson River.

As the children grew up – Hekker’s oldest is 50 – they sold their house and moved into a large flat above a shop in a building they had bought in Nyack village as an investment.

Jack became a local judge, and Hekker, with nurturing time on her hands, plunged into the world of meals-on-wheels and the local council.

After the divorce, she took on the job of mayor, which paid her the modest salary of $8,000 a year. She still lives in the flat, lavishly decorated with old wooden columns, bookshelves and restored panelling.

Their greatest problem, according to Hekker, was Jack’s escalating alcoholism. That both made him a liar – “dogs bark, cats meow, drunks lie”, she says – and tarnished his social standing. She became dominant, and intolerant.

Written by Charles Laurence

Read page 4 of From apple pie to humble pie

This article was created: 6 October 2006.
This article was last edited: 14 February 2007.

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