Apple pie moms watch out

From apple pie to humble pie

Part one: I was wrong

Part two: why women should work

Part three: sex and the married woman

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The family is evolving

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

Hekker believes the end may have come when on a single day he lost an election to county judge, and she won a seat on the town council.

As she reeled from the shock of the divorce papers, Jack took his new girlfriend on holiday to Cancun, Mexico.

“I don’t see why men walk away from a family just to have sex,” she says.

“You don’t have to wreck the whole family. If you have an itch, go scratch it. It’s better to have something on the side than to wreck the family. But I think with my husband, it was about being admired by women who didn’t seem to think that falling down drunk every night was unattractive.”

Once upon a time, she points out, a man who abandoned his family would have become an outcast, reviled by both family and peers. Now, there are no “social sanctions” left.

Statistically, as many as half of all married women can expect to be divorced at some point in their lives.

But as her rage and shame die down with the years, Hekker has come to realise that the family itself is far from over. It is simply evolving to cope with the new ‘self-sufficiency’ of men and women who come together for whatever stretch of time to set up households and produce children.

A woman who finds her nurturing role in life as natural as the sunrise, Hekker still has children and grandchildren, seven of them so far, to care for.

The family are all within short drives of her flat: her daughter, a high-flying executive with Fox TV, has moved to be close enough for Hekker to be able to rush over to school to collect a sick child, or lead the applause at the Christmas concert.

“To me, family is everything,” she says. “And I think people are coming back to it. If you have a reasonably decent family, the best gift for kids is still to let them grow up among that family.”

That is solace, at least, for a broken heart.

Written by Charles Laurence

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

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