What Does Gwyneth Paltrow Have To Do With Clean Countertops

Taking Stock

Like all good origin stories, this one starts with Gwyneth Paltrow.

I saw the Gwyneth version of Great Expectations when I was in high school and Gwyneth’s icy performance of cool (plus the fact that she played a star-crossed lover opposite the 90s fuckboy of my dreams, Ethan Hawke) made an indelible impact on me, which I wrote about here.

Largely thanks to this movie, and Gwyneth’s performance in it, I spent most of my twenties trying to be whatever the guy I was with wanted me to be (see here). It was all super chill and did great things for my sense of self.

Gwyneth became a mom in 2004, the same year I graduated college. The same year I’m ashamed to say sobbed my face off watching Garden State. The same year I took my BA in Theatre Studies from Emerson College and launched myself into the great abyss of adulthood. My grand plan was to “live my dreams” by which I mean I had no plan. I was the raw putty of young adulthood, thirsty for blueprints on how to be a person, achingly susceptible to aesthetic signifiers of a life well lived. Gwyneth became a mom at exactly the right time in my development to solidify “becoming a boho mom is the key to your happily ever after” as a wholly unexamined and misguided shortcut to self-actualization.