Appliances
After a Divorce, Who Gets the KitchenAid?
Stand mixers aren't just appliances; they're talismans for a certain kind of adulthood. What do you do with them when your life goes in a different direction?
My KitchenAid is a symbol, a talisman. It’s cherry red, I say, but the official name is Empire Red, and it takes up a significant chunk of my kitchen counter’s limited space. I’ve kept it through my many moves (across the country twice, to Central Asia and back, up and down the East Coast a few times), through my periods of uncertain housing when I lived out of suitcases on someone’s couch, and through my descent from local baking legend to gluten-free grump.
It was a wedding gift. I’d grown up using my mom’s 8-quart white model for baking cookies for church fundraisers, dozens upon dozens of pies for family holidays and birthdays, and loaf after loaf of homemade bread. It was a workhorse—she replaced a bolt in the motor once, but it’s still going strong nearly 30 years of hard use later. Baking was my comfort zone, an escape in the chaos of my huge family, and a way I bridged the awkwardness of being the weird homeschooler when I went to college. Many things will be overlooked if you come bearing cookies, and so that’s how I made friends at first.
My wedding happened right at the end of college, and my in-laws knew I loved to bake, and they loved my baking, so they got me a KitchenAid that matched our wedding colors (crimson, silver, and white) in that bright red that made me so happy. It was a 6-quart head-tilting model, smaller than my mom’s white bowl-lift one, but I wasn’t trying to feed nine kids like she was. It was perfect for my new household, and it felt like an heirloom in the making. I used it all the time, teaching myself how to cook for just two, baking cookies for my first real office job, making birthday cakes for my in-laws, whipping up holiday treats for our church friends. And then the marriage was over and the fantasy of a stable home and an heirloom to pass on dissolved.
But I still had the mixer. It was too nice to get rid of (unlike the cheap engagement ring my musician ex had gotten me, which pawned for less than $100), and it was still useful. Heavy and annoying, yes, but it carried with it a certain statement of class, of stability. It suggested the ability to afford a $400 appliance; it suggested the assumption that I would have a nice kitchen in which to show it off. It spoke to me, existing in my mind as an assurance that one day I would again have a kitchen of my own and a family to feed, that I wouldn’t always be alone and heartbroken.
This seems to be a common experience. I tweeted the other night about how I wished I could swap mixers with someone (I’m daydreaming about a green and blue kitchen now, not red) to reset my memories, and nearly 10,000 people jumped on to like and respond, offering their own stories of KitchenAid mixers left over from divorces and dead spouses, and how they felt about these appliances years later.
The energy of this conversation suggested that divorces require the parties involved to have a certain amount of pragmatism and vision for the future they’re creating, just like a wedding does. You have to think about what you’ll need in your new home, what you want to prioritize, what you will and won’t use. A KitchenAid mixer as spoils in the divorce settlement means you plan on having a future where you’re feeding other people, offering hospitality, creating community. Those who want to keep the marital KitchenAid mixer are those who are thinking about others and their relationships at large, about the communal nature of living in a way that anticipates sharing your food and home with others. It also suggests that you’re interested in a caregiving role in the future—those who leave the mixer with their ex are the ones who want a certain amount of liberty and open-endedness in their lives after the divorce.
The fact that KitchenAid mixers are the appliances that outlast so many marriages also suggests these are the holdout appliances of the middle class of yesteryear. My grandmother got married at the end of the Korean War, and she’s still using the toaster she received as a wedding gift. She was part of the actual middle class, back before there were so many billionaires tipping the scales. Her appliances weren’t designed with planned obsolescence: They were made to last, and that was a point of pride for the companies that made them. KitchenAid mixers are the only appliance I know of that still exists in this kind of space: affordable to many people as a one-time investment of $300 to $500, and built with the kind of quality that ensures it’ll last you a lifetime.
A sense permanence like that is both a blessing and a curse when you’re looking to reinvent yourself and your home. It’s wasteful to just dispose of something that nice, that generous of a gift; it’s an anchor or a ball and chain, too. I want a green one now, emerald or deep teal perhaps. I just want to grow things, to take root somewhere, and seeing greens in my kitchen echoes that feeling. I want my new KitchenAid mixer to remind me of the trees, not a young bride and heartbreak.
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Written by: Eve Ettinger
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19 Comments
Just last night, I pulled them out. I wiped down the Kitchenaid. I discovered it was too painful to look at -- this unmistakable symbol of domesticity and stability and what "married life" is supposed to be. For now, I found a spot for it in my small, unfamiliar rental kitchen, but it's in the back of a cabinet, not proudly displayed on the counter. Hopefully one day I'll start to associate it with the future and not the past, but for right now, it feels like a glaring reminder of the life I had envisioned, and how far we have come from that point. Thank you for this beautiful and timely article that encompasses so much of what I feel right now.
I'ma stop you right there. Your KitchenAid has zero to do with marriage or domesticity. Your KitchenAid represents possibility, growth, and the maturing of your cooking chops. Your KitchenAid does not require you have a spouse, it requires you have a mouth. Strip away the dank filter of your painful past and admire your KitchenAid through hopeful eyes.
My daughter is 2 years older than you and has been an addict for over half her life. I know that pain. Let 2023 be a year of rediscovery for you. Remember who you are. Remember what made you excited to have the KitchenAid in the first place and light that creative fuse. You have no limits. Read that again. You. Have. No. Limits.
I love this article and it’s very well written. I hope you find just the right one to set you on your new path!
As we approach a season of family, whatever family means to each of us, I found the article title shocking and inappropriate. The article content did not necessarily demand that title. The article content might even be interesting, but I am so angry about the title that I can't be fair to the content.
FWIW, I have been divorced 3x - not something that I am proud of. None of the "stuff" has ever mattered in the process. No children. Pets, which I claimed and thankfully no disagreements over them. And ... I have a Kenwood mixer purchased by me, for me after a lot of research. If I ever upgrade, it will be an Ankarsrum.
After my divorce, I gave our large, sturdy, white KitchenAid mixer to a friend to use to mix their ceramic glazes. A few years later, I bought a smaller ice blue stand mixer that fits beautifully in MY kitchen and is the perfect size for my family. Thanks for sharing your story, Eve.
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