let's talk about trad wives, part two

a FBMP find my husband refinished for me for mother’s day.

You can find part one here.

There’s a pretty obvious push and pull if you read between the lines of the many essays by feminists criticizing trad wives/homemakers. They feel like a strange marriage between envy and downward comparison.

Sometimes, in our culture, I think when we say something we’re expressing something else entirely.

To be clear, I don’t think everyone wants to be homemaking full time, or that every critical discourse on trad wives can be dismissed as jealousy (…but I do think that’s a big part of it). On the other hand, prescriptive trad wife content isn’t realistic.

Our triggers and our desires are telling us something about ourselves, though. In full transparency, I think that’s what I find so interesting about this topic. I’ll admit, it sometimes confirms my personal belief that radical feminism clearly isn’t working.

When feminist writers say, “trad wife lifestyles are unattainable!” I wonder— “okay, but is it just not your skill set? And do you feel badly about it because you were taught that domestic labor was for ignorant people who are below you?” The assumption is that a traditional life is a cage, a kind of pretty prison.

When I started baking sourdough in early 2021, I had almost a decade of solid bread baking behind me. I came into it with a significant amount of pride; I can make a decent sandwich yeast bread without paying much attention. My first memories are being at the kitchen counter with my mother, watching her bake. I really thought I was going to be cranking out gorgeous loaves with beautiful scoring and ears in no time. Sourdough, it turns out, required a near twelve months of tweaking a single recipe (after trying a few others that didn’t work), keeping fastidious phone notes, and experimenting (daytime rise versus cold overnight proof). This I believe, is partly why it is so chronicled online. I did finally find a method that worked well with all the elements including the specific humidity of where we live, how my starter behaved, and our oven’s temperature. It was then that I had a loaf I felt proud of. I’ve found that most of the domestic arts are like this, homemaking isn’t straightforward-easy, and I think that reality can sting if you were raised to eschew it. These skills will feel impossible when they’re no longer prioritized by those in teaching roles. My high school didn’t have a home economics class, with sourdough I was fortunate to have other girlfriends, also homemakers on the journey who could guide me.

I can’t imagine how daunting that would have felt if I’d never baked a loaf of regular yeast bread. If I hadn’t had other kitchen disasters and understood that mistakes are part of the learning process. I can understand why anyone would grow resentful of seeing a skill they fail at look easy, and beautiful.

One thing I’ve often noticed is that the sharpest critiques of trad wives often come from women who were raised in intact families. It’s easy to disregard home when home has always been grounding, safe, and perhaps even boring.

Right after my parents moved to Minneapolis and had me, they promptly left their cute southside block for Minnetonka, a tony suburb southwest of the metro area. Within a few years they were divorced. I have just a handful of fractured memories of that house and exactly zero memories of their marriage.  My parents generally split custody of me, and so I shuffled between them on weekends, some weeknights, and summer vacations. From the time I was four until fourteen, my dad lived in several rental properties, rarely keeping a lease longer than a year.

Shortly after we met, Seth told me he wanted to take me to his hometown to meet his parents. I was almost immediately nervous. I knew by then that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, and prayed his family would like me. Seth was from a small town; his parents had been married since they were very young. He had always grown up in one place. He’d spent the first part of his childhood in a blue house in town, next door to his paternal grandparents. From there, they’d moved a few miles down the road to a home on the lake. In eighteen years of childhood, I’d had countless bedrooms, while Seth had two.

Sometimes I describe my upbringing to people as “all icing, no cake.” I first visited Europe in elementary school. My dad took me to see the birthplace of Beatrix Potter. However, he spent much of that trip holed up in his bed while I wandered our hotel totally unsupervised. I wore beautiful clothing and took violin lessons. My parents were also constantly fighting about money. My dad had a boom-and-bust financial life that involved him not paying child support. This kind of upbringing handicapped me in certain specific ways. I was late to the game learning essential skills like emotional maturity and regulation. The chaos of my early years wasn’t sexy or aspirational. Even then, I knew as I looked into my future as an adult that my focus would be creating a healthy and stable family for my future children.