Welcome to Cult of Perfect!
This is a limited run podcast about the intersection of motherhood, public performance, and bodies.
We are Sara Petersen and Virginia Sole-Smith. You can read more about us here.
Today is our last episode (sob!) and we are so excited to wrap things up with our friend and living legend in the house. (Burnt Toast fans, we know you just heard her last week but there is truly never enough Angela! Everyone else, when you finish this episode, you’ll want to download this one.) We’ll save the mushy stuff for our final live thread next week, but suffice to say: Unpacking perfectionism and motherhood with you all has been a delight and given our therapists so much to work with. Thank you!
To hear today’s episode in full—or read the full transcript—you will need to be a paid Cult of Perfect subscriber. It’s just $5 per month or $15 to get full access to all six episodes, plus commenting privileges and our biweekly live threads. Founding members1 also get comped subscriptions to both In Pursuit of Clean Countertops AND Burnt Toast, which is truly a trifecta of content that embraces all that is imperfect.
PS. We’d also love you to add us to your podcast players—we’re on Apple, Spotify, TuneIn and Pocket Casts. And if you really love the show, please leave us a rating or review!
Cult of Perfect Episode 6 Transcript
Virginia
Today we are going to talk about the cult of domesticity. To start us off, Sara, can you talk a little bit about the messages you grew up with about what homemaking and domestic life should be. We’ve each touched on this a little bit over the last few episodes.
Sara
This is a topic near and dear to my heart. It’s all over Momfluenced, particularly in the chapter I wrote about my own maternal role models growing up.
I grew up with a stay at home mother (yes it’s a flawed term but we still have yet to come up with something better!) All of my aunts were (at points) stay at home mothers, and they were all deeply invested in the look of home and the feel of home. They all had really strong opinions about decor. It was really a part of my birthright. There was never a time when I can remember not having an opinion about throw pillows.
I remember, as we all do, the American Girl catalogs coming in the mail. That was not home decor—well, it kind of was.
Virginia
It’s a very domestic life. They’re always cooking and cleaning and doing laundry.
Sara
Totally. And you can buy the little tables and chairs and you know, little pillows for their beds. I would have very strong opinions about all the domestic furnishings. I would flip through Garnet Hill catalogs and dog-ear things for a home I did not own.
Virginia
Yes. L.L. Bean and Land’s End were also big for that. Especially, I mean, Sara and I both grew up in New England.
It’s so interesting, the way you talk about it feeling like a birthright. For me, domestic life was almost a little more of—fantasy isn’t quite the right word. I had a domestic life. I lived in houses. There were throw pillows in them. But my parents were divorced, which I’ve talked about before. Both my mom and my stepmom identify as pretty hardcore feminists who are not domestically oriented in a lot of ways. And yet, from age nine until I went to college, I lived in this town with a lot of stay at home moms. And I was sort of secretly very envious of the way my friend’s houses looked compared to the way my houses looked. My houses were messy. My parents are academics. There were lots of books and newspapers and pens everywhere, which no one ever put away. And the pens never worked and they were just everywhere.
I had one friend whose mom was decorating their whole downstairs in apples. Apples were a big 90s, colonial decor thing. Also vintage school desks. A lot of these other houses I went to were immaculate in a way that my house never was. So I was really intrigued by that kind of domestic life, but it was not my experience, necessarily.
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Sara
I think it’s interesting to tease apart decor versus order. Because my aunt—she was the oldest sister of three. Her house was always immaculate. The organization was always just very clear. Whereas, like, my mother was super creative as a homemaker, but order was not really at the top of her list of priorities. So I would have similar feelings of oh, I just wish I always knew where this cereal bowl was at all times.
Virginia
That was also lacking from my life and explains a lot about the compulsive organizer I have grown up to be, I would suspect. It’s not that my own childhood was unstable, but that kind of house represented this whole other level of stability. And, the girls who came from the moms with the apples and the organization and all of that, were also the popular girls at school. I think there was a whole pipeline of femininity that I was aware of and not quite understanding how to onramp. It was related to not having the right J. Crew peacoat.
Sara
I connected order to inner calm. In Momfluenced I talk a lot about rage, both my own and what I perceived to be my mother’s rage. I think I subconsciously connected domestic disorder with internal strife in some way. I imagined that people whose homes were completely neat as a pin felt internally at peace in a way.
Virginia
Which of course is nonsense, but I think I had the same idea actually. There was a girl whose house I would go over to sometimes and her mom would have, like, warm cookies waiting as we got off the bus.
Which absolutely was not my experience. No one was home when I got home. But her mom was also…bananas. One time we went to Home Depot with her and we wandered off for a minute, and she was screaming on the loudspeaker to track us down. It was clear her house was perfect because this was a woman who was desperately trying to control everything. I remember thinking, like, oh, I kind of thought you had the perfect mom but this feels like a whole situation. That family was struggling. We’re all struggling. But I think we sort of effortlessly conflate these ideas that organization and pretty decor is going to equal mental health and why on earth would they?
How much do you think your mom or your aunts were aware of an element of performance and what they were doing?
Sara
That is such a good question. I feel like for that generation, the idea of performance was almost a given. I feel like there was much more concern over external gazes and external judgment. As though a neighbor could drop in at any time and make some sort of pronouncement about your fitness as a housewife.
Virginia
And render some judgment.
Sara
Right. Whereas I really feel like our generation talks a lot more about giving fewer shits about everything, but particularly in terms of domestic perfection.
Virginia
And yet, our generation created influencers.
