wait...am i a trad wife?

keep your icons; we want flesh and blood

Three years ago, I got myself a subscription to Backwoods Home Magazine. I’d sit on our porch and plot the construction of a coup for heritage chickens (my husband, who works eighty hours a week at an office job, would build it for me). I hoed a plot for potatoes and splurged on a pink Christy Dawn dress with puff sleeves, even though I wear mostly black. 

When Backwoods sent the issue about DIY beef slaughterhouses, I cooled on my homesteader passions. I gave away the princess prairie dress and put flowers into the potato beds instead. Who was I kidding? The boys like their spuds frozen, from a bag. But I can’t deny the ongoing appeal of living out a Laura Ingalls Wilder fantasy. Turns out, I’m not alone. 

Like ten million others, I’ve been glued to Hannah Neeleman’s IG, both to her offerings and to the criticisms they inspire. The so-called “trad wife queen’s” photos and videos touch an ancient, archetypal longing, and I find myself at a juicy intersection: a progressive, ambitious woman, fascinated by a Mormon homemaker. I look around at the baby bottle on my kitchen counter, the granola I made this morning, and the flowers I’ve planted around our yard and it begs only one question: 

Am I a trad wife? 

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro Filipepi), Madonna and Child (Madonna col Bambino) // Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan

It’s a logical step given how I’ve fused my creative work to my motherhood. According to Meg Conley in conversation with

Anne Helen Petersen

in 2022: “Some people call any woman who centers her work in the home a trad wife. Sometimes just writing about work in the home is enough to earn the title.” Apparently, I didn’t even need that silly dress. 

Here’s another definition by Megan Agnew, who wrote this summer’s withering profile of Hannah and Daniel Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm:

Trad wives are an internet phenomenon; women who have rejected modern gender roles for the more traditional existence of wife, mother and homemaker — and who then promote that life online, some to millions of followers. Their lifestyle is often, though not always, bound to Christianity.

I could stop there, since I don’t identify with this description, even though the question of “rejecting” modern gender roles remains: how does a person who identifies as a progressive feminist square with a life that’s supported by historically patriarchal arrangements? Maybe you thought you were getting that essay today, and I plan to write it. But for now, I’m interested in what I see as a more quietly alienating phenomenon. 

Before I go further, let me say: I like Hannah. I think the critics who say she’s not a feminist are missing a lot (another essay for another day). Even though I don’t share her religious fervor or her reproductive politics, I’m for her, in the same way I am for any parent, loving their hardest; doing their best. I look at the trad queen and I see much to admire. You can’t deny that Hannah, with her creative discipline, her indefatigable love and the millions she makes spinning digital yarns with a calm smile, is something of an icon. 

And that’s our problem. 

***

A couple of weeks back, I visited the site of a volunteer project—St. Mary’s Catholic School. Mother Mary’s image was all over the place: hanging by the gym, in the kitchen, against the yellow-painted cement walls. She stood in the corner, a three-foot porcelain sculpture painted in blue and white, prayer hands pressed together looking—let’s be honest—like Little Miss Priss. Meanwhile, I heaved Bruce around in a carrier, and he scratched my face with his razor fingernails. I was a sweaty mess and the Mary statue, with her detached, beatific smile, somehow made me feel a little worse about myself. 

That quiet grin; that soft superiority. That invitation to aspire which, in the end, made me feel only less-than... Where else had I seen it? Ah, yes! All over Hannah Neeleman’s Instagram feed. It’s the smile of a woman setting a standard no other woman can meet. Let’s not forget that for the Christian trad wife, the foundational role model is a VIRGIN who gave BIRTH.

Hannah is the cultural ideal of our time—pretty, blonde, white. Her body ripens for fresh pregnancies every nine months, even though she’s bone-tired and nursing. We’re not seeing a person in her totality—except, as I mentioned to Stanley Fritz—in the little cold sores that pop out around her mouth, announcing her viral load and depletion. We’re seeing a woman play the role of MOTHER. Hannah, for all the criticism that she abandoned her dance career to start a family, has not exited the stage. Her life, as she offers it to us, is a performance.

Trad wives don’t just backslide us into an era where womanhood was narrowed to a sliver of acceptability, as their critics proclaim. That, in itself, is disturbing, but easy to ignore as political signaling. The bigger problem, the one that grates on me as I live in and through the exhausting, debilitating and the enthralling mess of parenthood, is that the trad movement misses the richest material: the flesh and blood connection; the deep, messy humanness of domestic life. 

That’s what I’m looking for when I scroll through Hannah’s account. I bet many of us look at her, projecting our own, unique aches. Are we parenting well enough? Did we get what we needed as kids? Wouldn’t it feel so cozy and snug, wearing calico around the Aga stove that never goes cold? Maybe this woman who personifies MOTHER with such commitment and totality can offer us whatever we’ve missed or are missing still. But she never does. 

Hannah & our longings 

Maybe I’m sensitive about this because my mom is also an icon.

Mom’s an actor, with a long resume. She’s taught me what it looks like to have a talent and to develop it; to feel the power of your creative spirit offered and received. Mom has to go where the work is, and, when I was young, that wasn’t where I was. Sometimes the distance ached. Sacrifices were made, as they always are, in the ecosystem of a family. But my mother is fully alive in the world. I grew up a feminists’ daughter: fully expecting the same self-actualization for myself. 

But of all the work Mom has done, and all the way she’s publicly revered, you know what I love most about her? The soft skin of her hands. The lipstick stains she leaves on coffee cups. Her messy, morning hair. As a kid, I wished for the smell of her in our hallways. Once, after she came back from a long trip to LA, I said something cutting—I don’t remember what—and I heard her swallow a sob. It filled me with regret, but also… belonging. Because it meant she was for me, still. Not an icon, but a tender, reachable human being. My flesh and blood mother; fully alive. 

my parents & me, waiting for Lily, 1987

***

In 2016, Christopher and I over-leveraged for an apartment that was (briefly) large enough to fit our family. The weekend after we moved in, Augie, three, found me crying in the closet. It was stuffed with boxes of toys. I remember the way he stared. “Mom,” he said, “is crying.” I’d **just** realized I hated Manhattan, so the sobbing didn’t stop, but Augie sat with me and offered me a plastic Melissa and Doug ice cream. He still brings this up, several times a year. Which is good by me, because I’m no icon. 

It’s when I am at my lowest that I’ve seen the kids circle up close. When I’m fragile, scared, exhausted, when I’m finally pushed to raise my voice and then apologize: we bloom for each other. Self-reflection and repair have been our greatest accelerators to closeness and trust. But you can’t fix something that never breaks. You can’t reach a person in a performance.

I’ve come to love the moments when the walls close in. (Best, of course, in hindsight.) I love when I meet myself at a subterranean low, facing my failings in real time, with small witnesses. Even grown-ups sometimes act out the sentiment: help me, I love you, I need you and I haven’t found the words. You don’t get to have the transcendent self without the mess it springs from.

***

Sometimes I wonder about all the blood that would’ve been in the manger. The smell of birth, mixed with cow shit. I imagine Mary’s B.O. as loamy and sweet; mushrooms and apples. Her baby would’ve loved her scent—it would’ve been his signal to start rooting. The warm, sanguine body would’ve been nothing like that porcelain rendering at St. Mary’s Catholic School.

What about Hannah’s body? How’s it doing? Really, though? I wonder.

I wish Hannah had told Megan Agnew how tired she is sometimes. Of course Hannah’s tired, she has eight kids and no apparent childcare. But instead the admission of fatigue came out of her husband’s mouth. Was it an afterthought? A joke? Daniel was criticized for answering constantly for his wife while she smiled along. But I’m equally saddened by one of the times when Hannah did openly speak her truth—telling the Mrs. American pageant hosts she feels most powerful when she gives birth. The feminist critics laughed as if to say that’s not empowerment. Too bad. 

What a gift it would’ve been to all of us to hear Hannah explain that she takes to her bed for weeks because the exhaustion of motherhood feels like a disease; a black wall that presses into her headlong so she can’t see the way. My heart would’ve burst with recognition and relief. Sister, YES. And what a gift it would be for other women to hear Hannah say she feels powerful when she has babies in a tub. YES YES YES. Getting away from my male OB/GYN who treated every pang as an emergency requiring mechanical intervention was the most empowered and feminist thing I’ve ever done. 

***

Maybe Hannah doesn’t want to rage and weep in front of ten million strangers—I get it. We’re all sharing to the degree we feel comfortable. But what a missed opportunity to have so many eyes and hearts upon you, straining in your direction, looking for you to give shape to what MOTHER could be—and to withhold.

I don’t think any of us want more mommy wars. We want to relate; we want to root for each woman’s choice; we want to be for each other. But we can’t get in through the veneer. We can’t access our idols. They’re myths, anyway.

I hope Hannah cries in front of the kids—not just alone in the pre-dawn barn, her exhausted hands wrapped around velvet udders. And I hope that maybe, in time, her performance of ‘realness’ evolves beyond her (mildly) untidy kitchen, and into a more honest emotional landscape. What a gift it would be to see her motherhood in all its fullness. I imagine, also, how empowering it would be for her to use her own words, and to have them believed. 

Until that happens, my favorite thing about the Ballerina Farm Instagram isn’t the heirloom chickens or the girls twirling by the ever-ready hearth. It’s Hannah’s uncovered cold sores—tiny portals to a bigger, richer, more relatable truth.

A mother, in flesh and blood; fully alive. 

Let’s be that for each other, shall we? 

With love, 

Isabel 

Now, to you—

1. Are you a person with moderate to progressive political beliefs who also sees/ yearns for/ experiences the sanctity of parenthood? (I don’t mean that in a religious sense—it’s just the most powerful word I can find for what parenting has felt like to me.)

2. How and when do you think parenthood—motherhood, in particular, became so politicized?

3. Who do you read/ listen to/ watch who lights you up on the topics of feminism and family life? What kind of honesty, information or permission are you looking for from those voices? (I love

   Summer Koester
   and this piece had me howling.)

4. What are the most interesting ideas for you in the space between where feminism and domesticity co-exist? IE: how can we begin to untangle the way culture has both siloed and collapsed these tropes?

Finally: Thanks for waiting an extra week for this essay. I planned to put it behind a paywall, as it contains the kind of personal history I reserve for a closer audience, but it turned out to be a richer thinking experience than I expected and something I need to claim. These ideas, together with what emerged in well…this is a fucking mom blog, spell out a whole ethos for me—as a mom, writer & human being.

The next two pieces will be zippy, personal and for paid readers only. I’ll write about crying through my surprise 40th birthday party and on releasing myself from the tyranny of youth.

I hope you’ll join me.