My New Hobby Doesn't Make Me Trad

Obviously. Sigh.

For my first couple years of motherhood, I was unemployed. In between careers at the time, making the privileged decision to stay home with my two young children was based both on financial sense and personal preference. Raised by a stay-at-home mother and surrounded by stay-at-home family friends and aunts, I had grown up unconsciously internalizing staying home as an ideal eventual arrangement for me as well. My unfortunate habit of consuming every Dr. Sears book I could get my hands on while pregnant with my first baby certainly did nothing to refute this assumption!

PTSD

As I’ve written before, my first year of motherhood was difficult. I battled postpartum depression alongside a painfully slow realization that institutional motherhood in America was more or less set up to make mothers feel like failures. Mothers are culturally expected to have innate caregiving skills (the maternal instinct is a myth!) and we’re societally expected to jump back into our relationships, our jobs, and our identities without making a fuss or asking for (or needing) help. We must absorb the financial cost of raising a child in a country which doesn’t offer subsidized childcare and we must physically and emotionally heal from childbirth (if that’s how we become mothers) on our own time (and dime).

I often felt lonely, bored, and intellectually frustrated as a new mom. I felt gaslit but lacked the language to pinpoint why I felt that way. Perhaps most distressing to me was my inability to always locate an adequate sense of wonder and discovery as a mother. This book–notably written by a man who got to write while someone else (probably his wife - I can’t remember) took on the fulltime care of his wondrous baby–didn’t help either!

In wondering about tradwives (AS I AM WONT TO DO), I’ve wondered more than once about their experiences as new mothers. Do they feel disappointed? Disillusioned? Or has their training to be fulfilled at all costs by motherhood somehow buoyed them against it?

I remain convinced that the mainstream allure of tradwives stems from a very human desire for clarity and certainty. While I believe that romanticized depictions of disempowered femininity can cause real harm to vulnerable young people wary of following in the footsteps of their lean-in, girlboss feminist predecessors, I think women who view wifely subjugation as anathema continue to consume trad content because there’s nothing more compelling than the illusion of simplicity in a complicated world.

And one of the things I wholeheartedly enjoyed about devoting those first three-ish years of motherhood entirely to childcare was the clarity and certainty of my days. I was not tasked with the labyrinthine task of dividing up my hours into waged work hours and unwaged work hours. My brain wasn’t primed to low-key worry about parenting stuff while working, and low-key worry about work stuff while parenting. I wasn’t constantly trying to resolve the impossible and merely alleged line between private and public life. And while I felt resentment towards my husband often, it wasn’t (most of the time!) because he wasn’t doing enough domestic labor and childcare. It was because he spent his days with adults. And because becoming a father hadn’t fundamentally reshaped his entire world the way becoming a mother had upended and remade mine.

Because Brett was gone all day and I was home all day, there were less questions and layers of doubt when it came to division of labor. If he wasn’t home until 7, of course I’d be the one making dinner and feeding the kids and prepping them for bedtime. Again, this isn’t to say that I didn’t feel frustrated, angry, or burnt out carrying the bulk of the domestic load during those years, but it is to say that my frustration, anger, and burnout did not stem from the sometimes impossible task of carving out equity in a two-parent home when both parents have external work responsibilities. Although I know for many women, it does. Especially when women are socialized to take on more of the domestic work and childcare than is remotely fair and men are socialized to not even see the need for a large portion of those domestic and childcare tasks.

Anyway, during my three years at home, I fucked around with domestic hobbies. I made SEVERAL batches of homemade granola bars. I thought about dinner before noon by which I mean I meal-planned. I may or may not have googled “sensory play.” NONE of these things made me a superior parent, but I suspect I was interested in such tasks (again, in spurts) because I had more brain space to cultivate interests directly related to my one job. I had the capacity to view such tasks as creative and (sometimes) fulfilling rather than unrealistic mandates from whichever momfluencer was in charge of Good Motherhood at the time. I also think I cared more about these types of things because my ambition and drive had to go somewhere. Homemade granola bars didn’t make me a better mom, but the effort expenditure did something important for my nascent sense of self as a mother.

Before I go any further, I want to be crystal clear. I am a happier, more fulfilled person when I can both work outside the home and mother but that does not remotely mean that my experience is or should be shared by anyone else. Motherhood is never something that can be generalized and the experience of mothering is never universal.

During the holiday break (which was honestly more of a SEASON than a break), I found myself thinking about the #trad idea of certainty and clarity. The majority of mothers must continue to juggle their work lives and their mothering lives even when the extenuating circumstances (children home all day unless you’re paying for them to be cared for by someone else somewhere else) suggest that to do so is a mathematical impossibility. It is frankly ludicrous to expect parents to continue to be good little laborers for capitalism when children need to be simultaneously fed, nurtured, and parented.

The human brain has proven to be not just bad at multitasking, but actually incapable of multitasking. And there are few things that demand this nonexistent cognitive skill more than being a fully present and engaged caregiver and a fully present and engaged worker at precisely the same time. The summer camp industrial complex is an incredibly expensive and incredibly stressful non-solution to this problem of parents needing to be in two places (and two headspaces) at the same time. Workplaces’ refusal to accommodate parents’ need to parent by not incorporating generous humane paid leave policies or free collective childcare programs further exacerbates the issue. Underlying the systemic failures to support families is the persistent myth of good motherhood as being synonymous with suffering, unceasing work and effort expenditure, and a promise to never complain. All of these conditions contribute to a country full of mothers trying to make their brains and bodies do something their brains and bodies aren’t capable of doing and feeling like shit because of it.

Because I have the privilege of work flexibility (and because Brett has the privilege of a generous vacation package), I was able to experience many moments during this endless holiday break not as maddening exercises in futility, but as soothingly simple instances of occupying one role rather than two. OF COURSE the kids fought and OF COURSE I screamed and OF COURSE by the end of the two???? three???? who’s counting?!?!?! weeks, every person in my household was ready for school to start. By day #319, 2PM felt like 11PM.

But the lack of email checking and social media consumption (I was off Instagram for the entire break) and the lack of external work (writing, researching, editing, and newsletter admin), gave my brain the space it needed to not feel nearly constant rage. Not rage towards my kids. Rage at being tasked with doing the impossible not because of a flaw in the system, but because that’s precisely how the system was designed. The construction of the mother who can do it all is a natural and necessary byproduct of a country which could not exist in its current iteration without mothers being forced to do it all.

During the break, I became interested in baking. Maybe that’s because I’ve been binging my newest favorite comfort-podcast, Milk Street, or maybe it’s because I wanted my kids to do something that wasn’t screen-based and cookies are an easy sell. I baked three types of cookies, one of which was stellar, one of which was good but only day-of good, and one of which was mostly a fail. I then proceeded to bake FOUR batches of the stellar cookie recipe throughout the break that never ended. My enthusiasm for baking bled into an enthusiasm for cooking dinner (something I’m rarely enthusiastic about most nights). I found myself eagerly researching new recipes and feeling SO GOOD while creating them and feeling even better when they turned out fucking delicious. See here and here and here. With one or two kids (never three because I’m not a masochist) tagging along to the grocery store, I found myself NOT HATING being at the grocery store which was maybe the most surprising discovery of all.

The stellar cookies! I spy my sexy Oofos.

Amanda Montei and I recently talked about the cottage industry of “no one talks about how great motherhood is” essays written by liberals and how these essays must be considered within the context of conservative pronatalist panic. You can’t, of course, really interrogate the nuances of maternal joy discourse without also contending with state-mandated maternal murder, and acknowledging that not everyone has the privilege of simplicity, choice, and consent. Or enough money to purchase 328 acres upon which to milk cows and cultivate a love of raw milk! And there is plenty of excellent literature about reclaiming the joy of caregiving as an act of resistance; and seeking satisfaction and fulfillment as mothers that doesn’t necessitate following a script written by white men.

It makes intuitive sense to me that something feels off about (even well-meaning!) pressure for women to more vocally and publicly wax poetic about how much they love being moms in a country led by people who think ALL women should be moms. And in a country led by people who are wholly uninterested in improving mothers' lives, which necessarily hinders their ability to enjoy those lives!!! And that’s the thing. In order to seriously grapple with the shape and meaning and even political currency of maternal joy, we need to consider the conditions for which maternal joy and satisfaction are most likely - or even possible at all. For many women, access to maternal joy is buried deep beneath layers of marginalization, domestic abuse, economic precarity, and lack of access to services and support.

It is easier to enjoy anything (work, parenthood, baking cookies) if one’s whole self is able to be present. If one’s whole self is safe. If one’s other selves aren’t demanding simultaneous attention.

It’s not just mothers who work outside the home who must deal with the organization of selves. There’s the mother who had children before any of her peer group. There’s the mother researching cost-prohibitive assisted living facilities for her parents while also researching cost-prohibitive preschools for her children. There’s the mother who is unable to take any time off during the holiday break!!! My (perhaps belabored!) point is that there are several extenuating circumstances that might increase the likelihood of maternal joy: Money, time, support. And (at least for me) brainspace. The world is not neatly divided into mothers who just naturally enjoy being mothers and mothers who just naturally do not.

On more than one occasion during my largely domestic holiday break, as I donned a literal apron and plugged in my literal standing mixer, I thought of my old pals, the tradwives. This contentment by way of domesticity is what they’re always promising. Fully “choose” to commit solely to the roles of mother, wife, and homemaker, they argue, and your life will be an endless exercise in gratification and familial bliss. Because you are fulfilling your purpose (as laid out by patriarchal religions and gender essentialism and J.D. fucking Vance), you will be happy! Your brain will be quiet. So will the uncertain world beyond your home.

Because I’ve devoted so much time to refuting tradwife propaganda as being bad for women (and even worse for poor women, women of color, and disabled women), I found myself almost unnerved by the sense of peace I felt when devoting myself entirely to arranging playdates, taxiing children to playdates, planning dinners, walking dogs, lighting candles, making beds (?!?!) and baking fucking cookies.

And then I felt mad. Mad that feeling reprieve from the unceasing demand to occupy many [feminized] roles at once made me feel even marginally guilty. Mad that so many parents didn’t get such a reprieve during the longest holiday break ever in record (!!!????) Mad that tradwives and the powerful white men who hold tradwives up as political figureheads (with or without the tradwives’ permission) have done such a masterful job at convincing so many Americans that domesticity, home, family, and the pleasure one might find through caregiving are the sole provenance of the conservative right. Mad, too, that the right has created a rift between women who have never argued that mothering and care and domestic arts are anything other than valuable.

How Both Feminists And Tradwives Are Getting Femininity Wrong

I understand that this is what many liberal women who advocate for more positive depictions of maternal joy fear: the right’s success at co-opting ownership of categories as vast and varied as FAMILY or HOME, which is all the more infuriating because the right doesn’t give a shit about families or their ability to thrive at home. And buying into the right’s incorrect and harmful belief that feminism means the denigration of domesticity and maternity and fucking candlesssssss jfc—(see Evie magazine!!!!)—means letting the right set the agenda. Me deriving joy and satisfaction from baking cookies has absolutely nothing to do with my intersectional feminist belief that all humans should have access to safe, meaningful, joyful lives. Baking does not mean I want to submit to my husband. Mother + home + cookies does not = tradwife!

I am not a bad feminist because I find candlelight pretty.

*******This essay was originally twice as long because I tried to squeeze in a big section about the misogyny baked into the popular connotation of a harried, unhappy working mother! More to come!