If you’ve never done it before, trust me: a home renovation can stress out even a strong marriage. And Jon and Kate Gosselin’s marriage—well, you already know. So when the first post-separation-announcement Jon & Kate Plus 8 began by flashing back to January, when the couple decided to get their kitchen redone, you had to know it would be awkward.
On the one hand, here were the Gosselins getting a Brand! New! Kitchen!, so some things never change. On the other hand, after they agreed to get the kitchen in the winter, there came the tabloid stories. And Jon’s “friends.” And the paparazzi. And sundry rumors. And an increasingly strained marriage. And then here came that long-ago-planned kitchen renovation, ripping up the house and dredging up all the sourness, like an old carton of milk discovered behind the refrigerator.
This Jon & Kate episode, at least, did a better job of integrating the reality of Jon & Kate’s split-up into the freebies-and-camping milieu of the show as it once was. Not just the chasing by the paps—we saw Kate on the beach, escaping construction with the kids, in her much-photographed orange bikini—but the effect on the kids: “They mentioned it numerous times, that they wished daddy could have been here.”
About daddy: there was not much Jon in this Jon & Kate. The kitchen work offered a good enough excuse to split up, and in the first half-hour he hung back with the construction crew, maybe taking solace in the work the way he seemed to with the American Chopper guys in their garage. The second half-hour, meanwhile, was pretty much all Kate and the kids, as she took them camping in the yard. (Wouldn’t you love to live next door to that lit-up reality-show set at night?)
Mrs. Tuned In—who admittedly is not a fan of the show but hasn’t been able to avoid the tabloid story any more than anyone else can—raised a good question. Is it possible that Kate, who was thoroughly demonized by US Weekly, et al., all spring (“From Mom to Monster”), is finally getting a handle on her public image? Or at least, that TLC is getting a handle on that image for her?
In the news, Kate has seemed to be keeping her head relatively low, while Jon’s swinging-single life gets all the attention now. And on the show, there she is,being a mom, wrangling the kids on the beach and in the backyard, declaring, “It is my new attitude that I am going to do things I have never done before. … If I’ve never grilled before, I’m going to grill. If I’ve never camped before, I’m going to camp.” She even put up a tent in her backyard herself—though she admitted letting the production assistants put up the other one. Baby steps, people, baby steps.
And so we left them, Kate and the younger kids settling into one tent, as the older twins Cara and Maddie stayed up and talked in the other. “I could hear them giggling and laughing. How fun to be almost nine and in your own tent and thinking nobody can hear you,” Kate laughed. “I could hear everything.”
The illusion of privacy. How fun to imagine it.