I jogged past a woman the other day standing by a throwaway mirror on the side of the road trying to get a photo of her husky peering down at his reflection through speckles of rain. It struck some kind of note to me as a very American mom thing to do. I've been living undercover in the U.S. from before pregnancy through to now, and I'm not saying these are ironclad, but there are some strong associations for me around American Motherhood:
Cookie cakes
Room spray*
Henleys
Dancing in the kitchen*
Those stools with the rainbow name cutouts
The TK-months-old baby IGs
Learning towers
Pumpkin patches*
"You have to come on our pontoon boat sometime"
Kelly Clarkson*
Viral TikTok dances of you trying to shake the baby out when you’re past the due date
Music written explicitly to appeal to the father-daughter-dance-at-weddings demo*
Hands-free breast pumps
Saying “heck” or “H” instead of hell*
Dressing toddlers as Bob Ross (always love to see this)
Lawn culture in general*
Push presents
Activities*
Working right up to the day you give birth*
Going back to work 12 weeks after birth*
Having “backstock” in your basement from Costco*
Holiday photo postcards* (Guilty; I wrote a few years back about the conflicted nature of family photos)
Store-bought costumes*
Mamava airport lactation pods
“Chief Executive Mama” culture
Buying a friend groceries as a way to help
Children’s books about ladies who persisted*
Goldfish crackers*
Real Simple
Hanging skeletons from your porch/paying $20 for an ornamental bale of hay
*No judgement, I have partaken (I partook) in all of these.
I have a working theory that we are, whatever our core culture, creatures of the environment we are born into as parents. The swirling eddies of expectation, convention, and lexicon. The motherhood brine, if you will. And for me, while the cucumber was Australian, the pickle juice was American, a distinct flavour. One day you’re moshing at a Less Than Jake concert and seemingly the next you are sponging glitter onto tie-dyed hardboiled eggs in someone’s Brooklyn apartment on a Wednesday night and blasting Imagine Dragons over the car stereo for the people in the carseats to dance to inside their restraints — this is simply how motherhood here works.
I realized how deeply America had infiltrated my endocrine system when I found myself back in HomeGoods for the second time in as many weeks recently, facing a confusing array of pumpkin decor. I had just walked into the store when I heard a woman adjacent the hanging wicker egg chairs in the pet section say to someone, “It was her birthday yesterday, so she deserves something nice.” She was holding a cat. The pet section is near the office section, which is near the bathroom section, which is near the lighting section, which is where we got our bedroom lamps. I went from “what is HomeGoods?” to “maybe I’ll go back and get that circle mirror and some on-sale apple cider candles” in no time at all.
But in all seriousness, what in heck is HomeGoods?
A 2017 article on Yahoo! Finance called HomeGoods the “most impressive retail story in America,” one held back only temporarily by the pandemic like a dam, later to roar through the spillway. TJX registered 36% y/y open-only comp sales growth in Q2 2021 on the back of a stock inventory strategy of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Purchases cannot be planned for via catalog or prior recon, but rather stumbled on and seized upon in a labyrinth of seasonal tsotchkes and off-price* liquidations (the liquidations are off prices affixed by mysterious original sellers, e.g., in-store rugs at an upstate HomeGoods still have on their packing labels from Home Dynamix LLC, a local rug retailer). CEO Ernie Herman explained in June 2021 (detailing the much-anticipated e-commerce store to be launched before the end of this year) that the “different inventory experience” in each store is responsible for the sense of a “treasure hunt” that compels shoppers each week. “At HomeGoods, you don’t go shopping, you go finding,” goes the tagline. It is a retail philosophy of wants over needs, since no one has a “Lady Boss” LED acrylic lamp or lacy ceramic goat skull on their shopping list.
*Generally “20% to 60% below full-price.”
The big question, regarding HomeGoods, as I will myself not to buy decorative pampas grass, is why? On the floor of HomeGoods, you have framed prints exalting shoppers to remember that “The Struggle Is What Makes It All Worthwhile” next to “I’m all about that baste” Thanksgiving napkins. The mood veers from a kind of Parton-esque grit to a Nicole Byrers/Nailed It easygoing charm. Culturally, it is nondescript. As at Pier 1, where I worked for a short while after getting my green card, the alluded-to shipping dock and Balinese freighters are nowhere in sight, and the “goods” are as unpredictable as the flotsam on the tides. Recent Harvest Finds (“EVEN NICER AT THIS PRICE”) included a felt jack-o-lantern in a hat, a capiz shell lamp, and a triple-decker ceramic pumpkin that, in its stature, wound up looking like a Christmas tree. It all raised a lot of questions: what kind of harvest are we all partaking? What wants or needs are we satiating?
In 1983, Wojciech Sadurski refined the Marxist idea of “needs” further into “genuine” and “false” needs, noting man’s tendency to justify his own “needs” above those of the community (regarding community needs, the board of TJX offers climate change reporting, but this tends to comprise a scanning of the environmental horizon for risks and opportunities). In the end, HomeGoods’ goods encapsulate Chris Lehmann’s critique of consumer culture, notably “its propensity to package itself so as to conceal the cultural and economic tensions that have conspired in its own creation.”
In other words, the felt Christmas wreath I almost bought brings the contradictions of American motherhood during late-late capitalism full circle. The source of the good, the laborer — these are invisible when you are attuned to the hunt, when you’re stressed and trying to work and put the Goldfish crackers in the silicon pouches for the kids and you just want your fake hearth to feel homey, where in the past you had more time, and a more involved community, and just made the decorations yourself. At some point, going to work straddling an ice maxipad and filling your house with seasonal throw cushions starts to feel right, or even good. I’m alway wondering how you solve the stresses of motherhood — which exist even in Australia! — and beyond the usual policy solutions, I don’t really have an answer, which is perhaps why the idea of journeying to a shop containing mystery solutions — perhaps the thing that will tie it all together! — seems so appealing.
It also loops back to a very astute 2000 New Yorker piece by Joan Didion on Martha Stewart’s appeal as a non-homemaker selling ideas about the the homemaker ideal, around the time of her IPO:
This is getting out of the house with a vengeance, and on your own terms, the secret dream of any woman who has ever made a success of a PTA cake sale. “You could bottle that chili sauce,” neighbors say to home cooks all over America. “You could make a fortune on those date bars.” You could bottle it, you could sell it, you can survive when all else fails: I myself believed for most of my adult life that I could support myself and my family, in the catastrophic absence of all other income sources, by catering.
Put this way, HomeGoods starts to look less like a homemaker’s Shangri-La than a kind of casino of potentially bargain-making for those of us high on the thrill of stretching limited dollars further, and realizing we are without a seasonally appropriate spatula. The endless parade of shopping trolleys with new inventory ensures this is always the case. The genius of the “treasure hunt experience” is that we never progress past it; each time we go back, the board has been reset, we are back at the beginning.
Speaking of American moms…
We have been re-re-rewatching The Sopranos, and came across this hysterical little throwaway in Season 2 last night — Carmela, in her palace of tsotchkes, with nothing to do in the daytime, sketching A.J.
The artist:
The inspiration:
The art:
I would say this is 16% too relatable to me currently as a freelancer who sometimes draws her own kids, and whose younger child needs to be picked up at 12:50 p.m. each day.
But also, it reminded me of this old classic:
The gap between our intent and the manifested expression of it!!!! Ah, life.
How it happened
The $20 crystal making kit I bought knowing there was a half-day coming up:
I did feel very bougie, though, throwing crystals in the bin later on.
Also in my house
Japhy, sitting with a hot bowl of mac and cheese: “I need you to bring a gust of wind over here to my bowl.” <3
Scout: *Just constantly asking me how long I’ll live, when I’ll die, when everyone else will die, etc.* <3
Goodies
Carina Chocano always popping up with something brilliant — this time, a piece on my countryman and PM of choice, Celeste Barber.
Jaron Lenier introduced here as “owner of the world's largest flute” (but in seriousness, a great profile).
Love Margaret Renkl always, but especially this essay on feeling 22.
I’m sure you prob already found, but Rosa Lyster’s water diaries for LRB are the best thing going.
Bit silly, but if you’ve ever seen an email you sent that looks funky as all getup when you get a reply and see it copied below, you might enjoy this one for McSweeney’s.
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY! If you care, I would love to hear your American mom signifiers - here or I’m at janetamanley@gmail.com. <3