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Representing the Single Mom (and Watching TV with Alex) In March 2004, ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition featured Contessa Mendoza, a single mother of three children, owner of a small, dilapidated home in California. Mendoza is introduced as a twenty-seven-year-old social worker who put herself through college while raising her daughter, graduated with honors, got a full-time job, and took in two foster sons in addition to providing a temporary home to other foster kids. In her application video, Contessa says “I’ve given my entire life to the kids. As a social worker, I’d probably never see the money to be able to do what ABC could do for me.” What the home-makeover crew did for her was truly amazing. With blueprints and bulldozer, the crew virtually tore down the house and built it up from scratch, adding a second floor, transforming the backyard into a nature preserve/campground, and tailoring each room to fit the personality of its inhabitant. Ten-year-old Analicia’s room became a Disney-inspired sea-world fantasy, including a huge aquarium filled with exotic fish; eighteen-year-old Angel’s a hip-hop hangout with expensive sound equipment; and twelve-year-old Tony’s a planetarium with a computer to operate a telescope on the roof. Contessa’s bedroom became a plush boudoir and her bathroom got a whirlpool. Said the crew leader, “We need to take care of Contessa because she has been taking care of everyone else. That’s her life. Now we need to make her feel pampered.” The Mendoza story was sponsored by Sears, which advertised its tools and appliances for home improvement throughout the show: “Shop at Sears: Ideas for the Good Life.” At the end of the seven-day makeover, the exhausted but exuberant crew planted a U.S. flag atop the house and awaited the family’s return from their trip to Disneyland. Contessa Mendoza , a “real” mother, becomes a televisual hero, her life underwritten by 1 45 Sears. In the intersections of reality and television, she represents to viewers what it takes for the single mother to become the desiring, desirable, and desired subject. Her home is transformed and she is treated exactly as her name suggests she deserves—as a countess. Contessa joins a growing list of single mothers who have become the darlings of national television and Hollywood. Single mothers on screen now represent the acceptance of some nontraditional households precisely because real single moms can choose—choose to have or raise a baby on their own and to consume, for both themselves and their children . These representations help legitimate the single mom within the routines of everyday life, making her part of the national family, moving her from the margins to the mainstream.1 The film version of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, released in 2003, featured a sexy and enterprising single mom, whereas in the 1957 book, the reader sees only the mother’s leg entering the house at the end of the day of trouble. We assume she’s married , but who knows? In the film, there’s no ambiguity. The mom’s status as single plays a big role in the plot, for it’s when she can’t immediately return to take care of the kids because of work obligations that the cat shows up, ready to wreak havoc. Despite her house literally falling down all around her, however, the mom resists the advances of the handsome next-door neighbor (who turns out to be a jerk). The final image shows a very happy mom jumping up and down on the couch with her two happy children. The freedom to choose not to marry is clearly connected to the freedom to spend, and as heads of households, single mothers may be even more attractive than single women without kids or married women: they have kids to support but they don’t have to run any purchases by a husband . As the authors of The Complete Single Mother boast, “Single mothers represent a growing $174 billion marketplace. Marketers are watching the rise in single mother household incomes and are now targeting this growing pool of women who make decisions on their own” (10). The valorization extends across other media: in films, romance novels , advice books, and Internet sites, the single mother is represented as the Horatio Alger of the new millennium. Television shows in the last decade featuring single...

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