Devastating Details About Martha Stewart's Daughter Alexis' Childhood
While it may come as no surprise that being the daughter of domestic queen Martha Stewart might be a challenge, Alexis Stewart shared some pretty disturbing details about what it was really like when she was a child.
The stories and recollections were encapsulated forever in her 2011 tell-all book "Whateverland: Learning to Live Here." They paint a picture of the exact opposite of what you might expect from the perfectly coiffed and crafty Martha. That dichotomy seems to be largely infuriating for Alexis, who is an American television host and radio personality who cohosted a radio show called "Whatever With Alexis and Jennifer."
"My mother has a sign on all of her doors to take your shoes off," Alexis wrote about when Martha invited people to her home (via ABC News). "For god's sake! My mother's dogs p*** and s*** on her rugs, and she's telling people to take their shoes off?"
Holidays were awful with Martha Stewart
What is perhaps the most surprising part of Alexis Stewart's childhood memories is that her mom Martha was terrible at creating fun and memorable holidays. "Halloween was also a grim affair: There were no costumes," she writes. "There was no anything. We turned off all the lights and pretended we weren't home."
Sadly, the painful holiday memories also didn't stop at just Halloween. "Martha was not interested in being kid-friendly," writes Alexis. "She would hand me things right before Christmas and say, 'Now wrap these but don't look inside."
Alexis says that she felt that her mother expected her to be perfect. "If I didn't do something perfectly, I had to do it again," she writes. "I grew up with a glue gun pointed at my head." Yet oddly enough. Martha managed to act very imperfectly when Alexis' friends were over. Alexis writes that her mom would use the bathroom with the door left ajar and didn't bother to close it when she had her friends over, something that mortified her as a girl.
Martha Stewart's advice on marriage and motherhood
Another story that Alexis Stewart shared in her book was about a woman in her childhood neighborhood who had a very rich but unattractive husband. "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 wrote.
Alexis feels that Martha, who was married to Andrew Stewart, Alexis' dad, was dispensing life advice, "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."
Though Alexis' book was forthright and raw, both she and her mom, Martha maintain that they have a good, albeit complicated relationship. The inscription on her book reads, "Thanks in advance to my mother for not getting angry by anything written in this book." Alexis said, "Everyone has stories like this from their lives," and that the quotes from the book were misinterpreted (via People Magazine). Martha and Alexis have appeared together on various television segments over the years and publicly support each other.