A fancy wedding gift, after a divorce, takes on fraught new meaning — eve_ettinger writes
Photo: Elizabeth Livermore/Getty Images My KitchenAid stand mixer is red. Empire red, I’m told, and it was a wedding gift. I feel fond of it. I’ve been divorced for a number of years and now it’s not tied to my former marriage as much as to the relative who gave it — I was a big baker in college, and they knew that I would want a good tool for my creations. It was a gift that, at the time, made me feel deeply loved. And even when the marriage ended, it kept spinning.
Sometimes, though, one of the throwaway thoughts that I toss up on Twitter hits a tender spot, and last week, it was a tweet about my KitchenAid mixer, whose red paint does, now and then, remind me of my ex. With 11,000 likes in 48 hours, the response suggested that saying the thing we’ve been ignoring collectively allowed everyone in the room to let out a long sigh of relief. About their mixers.
When I tweeted that I wished I could swap my empire-red KitchenAid mixer with another divorcée for a new color , I had no idea that there would be such a well of emotion around these appliances. Responses poured in from divorcées, widows, the still-married-but-finally-owning-my-preferences; everyone had a tale, a KitchenAid that was a magnet for complex feelings around the identities they had forged in their relationships.
When a kitchen appliance is given to a new bride, it often carries the weight of gendered assumptions, a suggestion of a certain kind of role. Does the giver hope it will make the bride more domestic, as my friend Amy’s ex-mother-in-law did? So, too, the gift of a KitchenAid mixer carries with it a load of historical assumptions about housework and gender roles and who makes sure that the household runs smoothly.
When I was getting married, I was in the process of leaving a fundamentalist cult and severing ties with my controlling father. I felt alive, in charge of my destiny, and I wanted a red KitchenAid to match that mood. But others had very different reasons for their color choices — there were dozens of replies lamenting the decision to get a “boring” white or silver or black mixer to appease a spouse who didn’t like flashy colors.
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