I Love My 'Tradwife' Life

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

I was born in a tiny town in southern Indiana in 1998. After my dad left when I was young, it was me, my two sisters, and my mom against the world. As we got older, we all got jobs and paid the rent together. My mom did the best she could, but she was gone most of the time working day and night, and we had to kind of fend for ourselves. Life was not easy; we had to grow up quick. I was worrying about bills at 14.

Eventually, my sweet mom brought us to Bloomington, Indiana, and we got a house through Habitat for Humanity. She was a very traditional Christian who had always dreamed of being a stay-at-home mom and homeschooling us, but obviously never could. I strayed politically from her—I’m right in the middle—but as far as the traditional life and family goes, I feel like I absorbed a lot from hearing how much she wanted to do it. Maybe that's why I'm so content to stay home and homeschool my kids. I want to make her proud.

I met my husband on Tinder when he was 18. I'm two years older, so I had just turned 20. He was still in high school, and I had just moved downtown, planning to start at Indiana University as an English major. I wanted to teach English in South Korea; I had set my heart on that forever.

But when I met him, everything changed. We fell in love. He was on the football team and a track star. He actually still holds some records at the high school here. He was very sweet and nice and he had his life together. He didn't drink or do drugs, which was rare around here. His family gave him a completely different life from what I grew up with. They all live in the nicest neighborhood in town. I felt like he was completely out of my league. 

I got rid of my apartment and moved in with him. I got pregnant and then had a miscarriage, and going through that brought us a lot closer as a couple. He was about to leave for the Navy and the only way I could go with him is if we got married. We bought cheap little Walmart rings and got married at the courthouse four months after we met. We didn’t tell anyone for a while—it was our little secret.

For us, the further we bend into traditional gender roles, the easier things are.

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to do extended breastfeeding and homeschooling and grow my own food. We bought a house that was built in 1898, just a little two-bedroom, one-bath, cottage-style house on a 1/4 acre of land. We have chickens and our garden, nothing special at all, but we love it. He was lucky enough to get decent jobs; right now he’s a foreman leading a cell tower crew. I quit my job at the grocery store when I had our oldest daughter in 2020, when I was 21. We had another daughter two years later.

We’ve been married six years now and it’s been great. It’s been easy—I feel like that’s the best word to describe it. For us, the further we bend into traditional gender roles, the easier things are. When I was working, there was a lot of room for imbalances, like when both people work but one person ends up doing more housework. But now it’s like, I do the stuff in the house, he does the stuff out of the house. He works, he provides, he does all the bills. I clean, I take care of the kids. It's black and white.

A typical day starts when the kids and I wake up at 8am and do our chores outside: getting the chicken eggs, feeding and watering the chickens, cleaning up any toys. Then we make breakfast together. Our four-year-old is doing a homeschool preschool program. Once a week we’ll be with the homeschool co-op, which is a group of parents taking turns teaching the curriculum for that day. We get together for class, field trips, holiday parties, music and art. 

Then we do a little gymnastics warmup, then the inside chores around the house. Then it’s nap time around 1:30 or 2pm, they wake up and have lunch. They play outside, even when it goes down to, like, -8 degrees. Then we come back inside and do free play, or color or paint or do something fun like shaving cream. I start dinner at 5pm, and that’s when my husband gets home. Then more play and bath and bed by 9:30 or 10pm. When the kids go to sleep, my husband and I will probably watch a show or play a board game, then go to bed at midnight.

What I treasure most about my life is that I can morph into whoever I want to be each day. One minute I’ll be a cook making complicated recipes and meal-prepping, the next a daycare teacher lesson-planning, a homesteader during planting and canning season. We can travel wherever, whenever with nothing tying us down. There’s no box we need to fit into, no rush.

I love my life, but I feel like I can’t really say that. The mom groups on Facebook are all about the struggle of motherhood. Maybe that’s a good thing, that we’re all more open about it. But it alienates a lot of us who are happy to have those struggles. I’ve also felt judged by friends. Very few of the people I grew up with even have kids, and I’m not even 26 years old with two. Back in 2019, when I was newly pregnant with our oldest, I went out to eat with a friend from college. Our meal turned into an hour-long interrogation about why I wasn’t getting an abortion, why I’d depend on a man, why I’d be so trusting. That moment solidified the fact that I would lose pretty much every part of my former life and the people in it.

We don't follow any religion, but I turn to people at church a lot for community. They’re more likely to be stay-at-home moms and traditional wives than the general public. I also started going on this “tradwife” group online. The term is a weird, glamorized label—an Instagram version of what my life is. In reality, it's dirty and gross and I’m on my hands and knees cleaning up chicken poop and dealing with diapers and screaming babies. But the online forum feels like a safe place to say these things. So if I have to go by the stupid name “tradwife,” I’ll do it.

We expect women to put off our natural maternal instinct, pay someone else to raise our kids, and leave home to work, missing the majority of our kids’ childhoods. We should leave open the opportunity for women who want to work, but also open resources up for those who desperately want to stay home but can’t. It’s almost going against the grain now to just be proud of being a mom, to breastfeed and stay home.

It’s this weird byproduct of feminism—which has been so great for women—to unintentionally alienate those of us who are happy to follow gender roles. I feel like if you asked a kid, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and the kid said, “a good mom,” they’d be looked at like they were out of their minds. It should be okay and even encouraged for moms to be content to “just” be a mom and a good wife.