While Martha Stewart was building a billion-dollar empire around her homemaking skills, her own daughter rarely enjoyed those talents in their own house. Alexis Stewart has written a tell-all book called Whateverland: Learning to Live Here, and though the book is dedicated to her mother, it also seems dedicated to revealing her weird foibles and shoddy parenting skills. From The Daily Mail:
‘Martha does everything better! You can’t win!’ Alexis Stewart says of her world-famous mother, 70.
Okay, that’s what every daughter on the planet has said about her mother since language was invented. Hang on, the good stuff’s coming.
‘If I didn’t do something perfectly, I had to do it again… I grew up with a glue gun pointed at my head.’
Now that’s more like it! I don’t care if Alexis is being metaphorical, I like to imagine Martha holding the glue gun to a little girl’s head and screaming, “NO WIRE HANGERS! EVER!”
She admits Martha was not a maternal figure, and had an unromantic approach to holidays like Halloween and Christmas. ‘Martha was not interested in being kid friendly,’ Alexis continues. ‘She used to make me wrap my own presents. She would hand me things right before Christmas and say, “Now wrap these but don’t look inside.”‘
Halloween was also a grim affair: ‘There were no costumes. There was no anything. We turned off all the lights and pretended we weren’t home,’ she recalls.
So that time Martha dressed as Medusa and Blake Lively was Cleopatra was all a lie? DAMN YOU, MARTHA!
But what about the scatological? Gimme something freaky, Alexis.
‘Mother always peed with the door open,’ Alexis says. ‘I remember saying, “You know, now I have friends over! You can’t do that anymore! It’s gotta stop! My friends’ parents don’t do it! Give me a break here! I don’t feel like being embarrassed! It’s exhausting! I’m a kid! Stop!”‘
Martha: “Better clear out, kids. This one’s gonna test the limits of my homemade potpourri.”
Martha also had some unusual dating advice for her only daughter. Alexis, who is divorced, writes: ‘A woman lived near us when I was little had married someone very wealthy and very unattractive, and my mother actually told me when I was a small child, “Now Alexis, if this ever happens, you make sure you have sex with somebody else to have their baby. Don’t have his baby.”
‘She was very practical about it. It was a survival skill – you have someone rich and ugly who takes care of you, and you have someone who’s hot and makes attractive babies.’
Aw, what a romantic. I can’t believe her daughter is divorced after getting such rock-solid relationship advice.
