Every day for a decade, I’d take freshly baked bread out of the oven in time for lunch with my four young children, the delicious smell of warm dough wafting through the kitchen as we ate.
Typically, we’d then spend an afternoon at the library before returning home, where I’d prepare supper before putting on a pretty dress and applying fresh make-up before my husband’s return from work.
This description could come from a 1950s women’s magazine – or the social media feeds of the young, new breed of ‘trad wives’, whose content depicting the idyllic lifestyles of modern home-makers is so popular there are more than 133 million such posts on TikTok.
The most famous ‘trad wife’ influencers – mother-of-eight Hannah Neeleman, 34, known as Ballerina Farm, and Nara Smith, a 23-year-old model and mother of three – each have more than ten million followers.
For many, the appeal is a desire to return to a time when life was simpler and focused on the really important things, such as family. Plus, you can’t deny it all looks so photogenic.
Yet content like theirs – baking cakes in a designer dress or lovingly hand-sewing children’s clothing – sends a chill through me.
I was a trad wife before the term was invented, and what many don’t realise is this picture-perfect life has a dark side that leaves women feeling powerless and miserable.
Yes, I was unburdened by the responsibility of earning a living, leaving me ‘free’ to concentrate on creating a happy and healthy home.
Far from being inspired by pretty young women cooking for their husbands and raising cute children on Instagram, we should be horrified, writes Enitza Templeton
But what that episode of me taking fresh bread out of the oven didn’t show was that I’d get up at 5am to start making it, not out of passion but out of fear. Or that I went to the library because I was home-schooling my older daughters – and otherwise barely left the house.
Far from being inspired by pretty young women cooking for their husbands and raising cute children on Instagram, we should be horrified.
Growing up in Florida, in the US, with loving and devoutly Christian parents who believed in clearly defined gender roles, I was born to the life of a traditional wife.
One childhood memory is excitedly telling my dad I’d be a brilliant lawyer when I grew up.
He just laughed. ‘Forget it, sweetie. That’s a man’s world.’
To him, me having a career was unthinkable. As a girl, my purpose in life was to find a husband, have lots of kids and take care of them all.
As soon as I was old enough to hold a spoon, I was helping mum in the kitchen, while my dad and older brother never lifted a finger.
They held my Puerto Rican-born grandma up as an example: with seven kids and countless grandchildren, she was always deluged with visitors. Who would want a career when you could have a house full of love?
She made a compelling case for the trad wife lifestyle. But as a child, you don’t see the lines etched into someone’s face by years of toiling for others.
Trad wife influencer Nara Smith, a mother of three, with her model husband Lucky Blue
As I grew older, a small part of me started to wonder what else might be out there. I’d sneak out to parties, always worrying that God would punish me in return. This feeling was reinforced when I was sexually assaulted, aged 18, by a man I’d previously considered a friend.
I vowed not to stray from a traditional path after that.
I did manage to go to college and get a degree in graphic design, but stayed in my home town to study, too scared to flee the nest.
But after graduating, I decided to move away. My parents’ horror at me going it alone disappeared when I told them I was only going to look for a husband, as I’d clearly not managed it at home. This was partly true – but it was also my stab at freedom.
It would be short-lived. A month after arriving in Denver, Colorado, aged 24, I met the man who would become my husband. A colleague at the firm where I worked in HR, I was drawn to his confident persona and the fact he appeared devoutly Christian. He inspired me by talking about his ambition to get rich and provide for a wife and a big family.
I thought I was in love with him, but I realise now I was more in love with the idea of him.
With the benefit of hindsight, I now believe he pulled the classic manipulator’s trick. He mirrored everything I thought I needed so that, in turn, I would do whatever he wanted.
In 2009, two years after we started dating, we eloped and got married, so deeply in love that we wanted the focus to be only on each other.
My parents had met him only twice, but they were thrilled; I was finally going down the path they’d planned for me.
At first, I continued working in HR and we weren’t in a huge rush to start a family. But when, two months after the wedding, my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer, my world fell apart.
Thankfully, she’s now recovered. But I wanted my children to spend time with their grandmother before – God forbid – she might be gone. So I quickly got pregnant with our first child.
Six months later the company I worked for downsized and I was laid off. With a healthy redundancy package and a baby on the way, my husband and I decided to make a go of the lifestyle we had always said we wanted.
At the start, it was fun. I was dreaming about the baby I would have, thinking of exciting dinners I could cook for my husband.
The decline set in after my daughter was born. My husband made it clear he wanted me to be entirely devoted to her care; even on the night I gave birth, he left me alone in the hospital so he could ‘get some work done’.
My days revolved around childcare. My only social interaction came from the other mothers I met at mid-week women’s Bible study classes.
I believe fear of the outside world is a large part of what drives the trad wife movement.
My husband would tell me he wanted a ‘pure’ and ‘natural’ family. So I made baby food from scratch and used cloth nappies instead of disposables as we were concerned about how chemicals might affect our child’s hormones. This meant washing and drying a dozen nappies every day. He even encouraged me to make my own laundry detergent.
This fear of somehow ‘harming’ my family is why I made bread daily. I wasn’t even allowed to use quick-action yeast, which is why I had to start the process at 5am.
The influencer, whose videos regularly include her preparing food from scratch while wearing glamorous outfits, has more than ten million online followers
And far from me not having to worry about money, with just one salary coming in we were always living off the kindness of others.
Still, I had always thought a big family was the route to happiness. By the time my eldest was six, I had three daughters and a son.
Using formula to feed my babies was unthinkable. I even rejected pain relief in the maternity ward, knowing my husband would praise me for it – until he left the room, and a quick-thinking midwife offered an epidural.
Having four little ones is a challenge for any parent, and things were complicated further as my second daughter has Down’s syndrome and was born with a heart defect that required surgery.
I was so busy looking after my children and the household that I had no time to wonder whether this was really what I wanted.
If I had, I might have questioned if it was in my best interests to have no life beyond the home and so few friends; if it was my Christian duty never to deny my husband sex – especially since I still had issues with intercourse after my teenage experience – and whether my sexual pleasure might matter, too; if my husband’s rigid approach to the way we lived was healthy, or if it was wise that I had no financial independence.
I loved my children so deeply, but I kept waiting for that sense of fulfilment from motherhood that had been promised. It never came. I felt deficient. Broken.
I never had the words to voice any of this, and certainly not to my husband, who seemed happy with the way things were. Back home, my family were also bursting with pride.
But I felt ever-more unhappy –and lonely. Isolation is another aspect of the new trad wife movement that alarms me. If your family is your world you are inevitably isolated, and social media is no replacement for real‑life friends.
For some, the isolation is literal. Instagram’s most famous trad wife, Hannah Neeleman, for example, lives on a 300-acre farm in rural Utah.
Mormon Hannah was set for great things, studying ballet at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York – before packing it all in to get married.
Some of her social media followers question whether she’s been brainwashed by her husband Daniel, the son of a billionaire. But she claims to be a modern woman just ‘doing what God wants’. I once thought the same of myself. Yet even with my desperate attempts to conform, my marriage was failing. We rowed constantly.
But having been raised believing the worst thing you could be was a single mother, I made one last attempt to save my marriage. It ended up being the reason I left.
I decided to get therapy to deal with the trauma of that historic sexual assault, believing it would help ‘fix’ things. But when I told my therapist about how I lived my life, she didn’t mince her words: ‘Your relationship is toxic, Enitza. You need to leave.’
It was like a switch had flicked in my brain, opening me up to the possibility of new way of living.
After all, I’d met fellow mothers at my daughter’s Girl Scout meetings, who were successful working women as well as being dedicated to their children.
I no longer felt like a vulnerable child who needed a leader, and I no longer believed in God – or my husband’s claims that bad wives went to Hell. For me, faith had become simply another way of controlling women.
Inspired by caring for my disabled daughter, in the months before I left I qualified as a nursing assistant, justifying it to my husband as another much-needed stream of income.
Finally, after an explosive fight in 2019, I demanded a divorce, knowing that, at 36, I finally had the means to fend for myself.
While I’ll never regret having my children, I want them to learn from my mistakes, to know there is no pressure to settle down and have a family. That way, they’ll never find themselves in the complex situation I’m in of explaining to them that, as much as I love them, my life would have turned out so much better if I hadn’t had them.
As part of my healing journey, I started my podcast, Emerging Motherhood, exploring how women can find identities outside of just being mums.
Today, I have no relationship with my ex-husband other than logistics about the kids. I’m in a new relationship with an amazing man who supports my work.
The life I now lead is the absolute opposite of that of the Instagrammable trad wife. But it’s more perfect than life ever was when that was my reality.
- emergingmotherhood.com/home
As told to Olivia Dean
