Mediocre Housekeeping
all the women's magazines in the world couldn't save my first marriage, or me
I started reading the magazines right before my wedding. Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Women’s Day, Family Circle. When I became a parent - nine months after marriage - I expanded my reading to include parenting magazines, but it was the magazines that showed me how to keep house, marriage, and family intact that really hooked me in.
I was 25. New to the world of housekeeping, cooking, marriage. I lived at home with my parents until a month before the wedding. I never lived alone. And now here I was, part of a couple living together. There was more than me to think about. I couldn’t just throw my clothes on the chair in my room or eat cereal for dinner. That was for singles. I was married. I was a lady of the house. I had to look and act the part, so I turned to the myriad periodicals available to me to help me sort it all out. Sometimes I bought the magazines at 7–11, but mostly I went to the library and spent hours there poring through the pages of current and back issues. I was a woman obsessed.
It was all there between the slick pages; recipes, cleaning tips, motivational mantras, exercise programs, decorating themes. I ate it up. We had a small apartment — a dormered one bedroom on the second floor of my cousin’s house — and I tried my best to make it our home, using all the ideas in the magazine, ideas I made photocopies of and saved in well organized folders. I would become the perfect partner, the perfect housekeeper and, later, the perfect parent. I would take a leave of absence from my library job right before the baby was due and become the ultimate housewife.
The women’s magazines I read with enthusiasm assured me my hard work would pay off, that if I followed all their instructions, made their recipes, accepted their beauty secrets, I would feel accomplished, successful, and beautiful. When my daughter was born I did the same with the parenting magazines. I subscribed to Parents because it was worth the expense to make sure the newest issue came to my house every month, with the newest tips and tricks, the newest product suggestions, the most up to date advice.
When my marriage began to unravel, I went to the library and looked up articles on relationships and saving them. None of the magazines I read really covered that. They were all about happiness, contentment, keeping the peace. They weren’t about heartbreak, divorce, and despair. All the country kitsch decorations and variety of ways to serve pasta in the world couldn’t fix that. I read through the pages with a heavy heart, feeling like I failed the writers. I failed myself. I put so much effort into making the perfect existence and that couldn’t save me from what was unfolding.
Where did I go wrong? I followed the instructions. I recited the inspirational platitudes. I cleaned the house, made the beds, cooked delicious meals, did crafts with the kids. I looked at the covers of all those magazines, at the photographs inside, and I swore for a while that I saw myself reflected, that I had perfected the lifestyle I was looking for. Now those same magazines were just bringing me heartbreak. They set me up for a beautiful life and I couldn’t close the deal.
Maybe I was too young, too immature to realize that I had set myself up for failure rather than success. That all the articles did were help me set goals for myself that I could never fulfill. Society put forth an expectation on me; I tried and failed to meet that expectation. I thought my marriage falling apart was a reflection of my lack of ability to meet the demands of a relationship. Maybe I didn’t keep the house clean enough. Maybe I should have made more exotic dishes. Done more crafts. Used different colors in the living room. I wracked my brain trying to figure out why I often got the cold shoulder, the silent treatment. I looked within myself to see where I could improve, where I could make him treat me like he loved me again. There was nothing in the pages of Good Housekeeping about all that. Those pages were full of bliss, the letters to the editor gushing paragraphs of how much the articles changed the lives of other women. There was never a letter from someone who screamed “why not me?” at them, never any words about a marriage suffering from failure to thrive. How to pick the right coffee pot, grow your own basil, burn some fat. Those things were there. But my plight was not. The magazines were no longer for me. On the evening of the day we decided to end it, I threw my carefully curated folders into the garbage.
Of course, the magazines didn’t fail me. I didn’t even fail me. A combination of my ex’s gambling problems and a serious lack of communication did us in. Nothing in the archives of Women’s Day was going to save us from that. I continued to read my parenting magazine until I realized that they, too, held nothing for me but unattainable goals.
I learned to go on my own instinct. I learned to relax the rules about keeping the house spotless a bit. I ate cereal for dinner sometimes. I subscribed to magazines like Rolling Stone, looking for something to read for pleasure rather than information on how to perfect my life. I may have been partner-less at that point, I may have had a messy house where the couch cushions were torn and my kids were eating pretzels for breakfast, but it was a comfortable sort of perfection, the kind not generally found in women’s magazines. We all find our own way, eventually.