Greetings, friends. If you live in the Charlotte area and are interested in upcoming literary or medical-themed events, there are a couple listed at the end of this article :)
The other day, one of my kids bounced into the living room and said something startling. I was recovering on the couch after a strenuous experience using my new air fryer and didn’t think I’d heard correctly.
“Can you repeat that?”
“I said I want to be a tradwife when I grow up.”
I sat bolt upright. I could feel my eyes popping from my skull, as if they were attached to coils. “What the … Where did you hear that word? TikTok?”
My child started slowly edging backward, the way you might if you unexpectedly encountered a rabid raccoon in the living room.
“Do you even know what that means?”
“Uh, yeah. Everyone knows what it means. A wife who doesn’t work.” She gave this some consideration. “Like you.”
Now I was really pissed. “I work!”
“You write books.”
“…”
“Which is not work.”1
“I have to congratulate you,” I told her, after taking a moment to allow steam to boil out of my ears. “You’ve unlocked a level of wrongness never previously achieved in human existence. I didn’t even realize it was possible to cram so many catastrophic errors into one conversation.”
“Huh?”
“I blame myself. This is a total failure of parenting.”
“It’s okay, Mom, I was kidding.” She held up her hands to demonstrate innocence. “I don’t want a job, ‘cause working sounds unpleasant, but I don’t want to be a tradwife either. They’re like servants. I just wanna outsource things.”
“So,” I sputtered, “your plan is to do nothing? At all?”
“I plan to shop.”
“OH MY G—” I stopped, puzzled at her expression, which had morphed from a dopey yet entitled look to one of barely suppressed laughter as she skipped out of the room. I could hear her giggling all the way down the hall. “Gotcha, Mom! Hahahaha! Byeeeee!”
I had not yet recovered from this hilarity when my teenaged son slouched in.
“Hello, Boom,” he said. (He calls my husband and I ‘the Booms’ even though we are youngish GenXers, not Boomers.) “Can you make me a pizza?”
“I cannot,” I said weakly. “I’m done with being a tradwife.”
“Translate.”
“It means make your own pizza.”
“Ok, Boom.” He casually slung a disc-like frozen pizza in the toaster oven as if it were a frisbee and slouched out.
“You forgot to turn it on!” I hollered.
From very far away: “Can you do that?”
“Fine,” I grumbled, forgetting for the moment that I had just spent 20,000 hours assembling homemade mozzarella sticks for the air fryer. When I say “homemade mozzarella sticks” I do not mean that I milked a cow, collected cream, churned it into butter, made cheese, collected eggs from my hens, baked a homemade loaf of bread, shredded it into crumbs, and assembled the whole thing with my bare hands as would a legit tradwife. I did, however, grind up some store-bought bread in the Cuisinart, combined it with flour and egg and spices, rolled some store-bought cheese sticks into the mixture, froze them and then air-fried them, which, at the very least, makes me tradwife-adjacent.
This might come as a surprise, given that I am a pretty liberal person, but I dig the concept of a tradwife.
Sort of. I do have some caveats.
Here’s the truth: while I am not down with any suggestion that women should defer to men for all the serious decision-making and career-experiencing—and I obviously abhor any of the alt-right nonsense that a few of these people seem to display—I do mightily admire the type of person who can make things from scratch. I follow the most famous such person, BallerinaFarm, on Instagram and I love watching her as she bakes bread and guides her darling little children through all the domestic activities. The reason I derive such a deep sense of comfort and satisfaction from my vicarious Instagram tradwifing is deeply personal.
It’s because … it reminds me of my mother.
Unlike Ballerina Farm, my mom is not a Mormon with 100,000 children, nor did she compete in beauty pageants, despite her effortlessly gorgeous appearance. In her youth, she was more of a hippie-esque back-to-the-earth social-justice type, who also happened to be extremely proficient in the domestic arts. She didn’t wear makeup and her glossy hair was long and parted down the middle, which, coincidentally, is now the fashion again.
Like Ballerina Farm, my mom zipped around our country home tending vegetable and herb gardens, baking bread from scratch, and canning her own fruit. She also designed and sewed our clothes and curtains and toys, pinned laundry on the outdoor line to air-dry, and arranged flowers. She read to me and my sister every day. She crafted all kinds of complicated art projects. Long before the existence of the internet, she used her considerable photography talent to create little “books” about her children to send to her mother-in-law in California, so she could keep up with our daily lives. In a way, my mom was the OG Blogger.
(Example below. This one turned out to be somewhat prescient, except for the best-selling part.)
Also like Ballerina Farm, my mother is a devoted adherent of the idea that children should participate in every aspect of housework. From the time I could toddle around, I did all the things alongside her: I swept floors, washed dishes, and folded clothes. Under duress, I cut up disgusting raw chicken. I gently and satisfyingly patted flour onto firm yet squishy rolls of dough, then rolled out the dough and cut it into interesting shapes for cookies and pies and rolls. I manned the sewing machine (although to be honest, this skill never quite took and my mom was forced to rip out a lot of seams on my behalf.)
When I had kids of my own, every visit from Nanna meant I’d find my kids cheerfully chopping and baking and cleaning and sewing. Sometimes I’d have to grit my teeth at the mess, which bothered Nanna and the kids not at all. Talk about a full-circle moment. I love it.
Neither of my parents believed in buying things if you could make them yourselves. My dad, a literal genius, was able to engineer any number of contraptions other people would not hesitate to purchase. He’d go to the junkyard, collect various rusted scraps, and emerge from his workshop with drivable trucks and functional appliances and oddly attractive furniture. He designed and built our passive solar, energy-efficient house. He did his own car maintenance and mowed our giant rural yard with a tractor, including “accidentally” mowing down a large patch of rhubarb, which he did not like. He built a grape arbor and planted fruit trees. We didn’t have air conditioning, so in one of his less-successful endeavors, he rigged up a system of fans to cool the house. When he wasn’t building stuff, my dad was working to develop a toy company designed to provide economic opportunity in the region.
So yes, when I was young, you could say my parents embodied traditional gender roles.
However, embodiment of traditional gender roles should not imply a disdain of nontraditional gender roles. Stay-at-home dads rock. Women can be mechanics. The Taliban sucks. Everyone should have agency in their own lives. You get the drift.
My sister and I were raised to know how to cook and clean and sew, but also with the firm expectation that we would be productive, capable, empathetic members of society in any career we chose. Although I vociferously bitched about living in the country when I was a teenager, I enjoyed an idyllic childhood. My parents were industrious, frugal, loving, and brilliant. We were awash in books and ideas. My parents believed in fighting the man when it came to things like injustice, so the whole family volunteered for various human rights causes like it was our job.
Eventually, it actually became my mom’s job: she founded a grass-roots organization in Eastern Kentucky to uplift some of the most impoverished areas in the country. She drove hundreds of miles a week and battled endless hostile bureaucracies, but she made an enormous difference in the lives of thousands of people. She received almost no outside recognition for her work, but her people love and revere her to this day. She was paid very little. My parents could have made a fortune if they’d been interested in that. They weren’t. Ours was a privileged life nonetheless, full of love and faith and intellectual stimulation and bounteous beauty. And really good food.
My point in sharing all this? I have always believed that women are presented with a false dichotomy when it comes to the idea of home versus career. As long as no one is coerced or harmed, I don’t see any reason for us to judge one another’s choices when to comes to personal fulfillment and I also don’t see any reason for anyone to insist that everyone should live as they do.
In my own life, I think of the whole domesticity-vs-career thing more as a continuum that ebbs and flows throughout various life phases. I’ve experienced both ends of the spectrum: I’ve had a rewarding, hard-charging, testosterone-infused career as an ER doctor, and now, after some catalysts in my life, I’m currently allowing myself a more forgiving schedule.2 I cook and teach classes and write articles and novels, all of which is satisfying intellectually and aesthetically. To be clear, I have plenty of help. This includes my husband, who has supported all of my careers from stay-at-home mom to full-time doctor to full-time novelist to part-time medical school instructor to part-time writing instructor. This year I am especially cherishing my time with him and my children. I’m also loving the normal amount of sleep I’m finally getting, after decades without it.
Maybe I can’t do it all all of the time, but I can do it all some of the time.
Having a career, whether inside or outside the home, will often necessitate sacrifice. Time is a finite resource. I get that. Things are not always going to be easy or good. In my own life, sometimes I am wildly unsuccessful. Sometimes I am miserable. Sometimes I am deliriously happy. Mostly, I have been very content and very thankful.
All of us deserve the opportunity to decide for ourselves what constitutes the right balance between domestic goddess and corporate boss. Why should it bother me if a person decides the right career for them is hardcore homemaking? Being a back-to-the-earth homemaker like Ballerina Farm means basically living the life of my great-grandmother, except with more video documentation.3 Farming requires a phenomenal skillset. So does mothering, for that matter. It’s a beautiful life, and a hard one.
Likewise, it shouldn’t threaten anyone when women are doctors or pilots or presidents. Or for that matter, when women are nurses or teachers or sales assistants or artists or whatever career we choose for ourselves, if we are lucky enough to be able to choose. A career outside the home doesn’t make us inferior mothers or wives. It doesn’t mean our households suffer. I mean, yes, our children might suffer a lack of homemade mozzarella sticks. But they gain the knowledge that their mom is a badass with incredible, hard-fought accomplishments. To some extent, I’ve lived both these lives … and I am grateful for them both.4
Writing novels is definitely a job and so is parenting. In many ways, I find them both more difficult than doctoring.
I am aware there is an element of random fortune and worldly bias baked into the idea that you can adjust your life to suit your desires. If you have to work a job you hate in order to barely survive, you don’t have the ability to maximize your health and well-being. If you never had education or encouragement, you aren’t as likely to have a high-paying job … and you’re less likely to be able to afford help. Inequity and oppression are real. These are topics for a different article, but we should all strive to create a world where everyone has the means and opportunity to find fulfillment. I often feel guilty for my life of luxury—not because I haven’t worked hard, since I have—but because life is so unjust for other women in my own country or around the world. It really doesn’t matter how industrious you are if the Taliban doesn’t let you leave the house.
Ballerina Farm is open about the fact that she is basically an empire. She has an army of farm employees and a full-time teacher who comes to her house to educate her kids. I don’t know much about her beyond that, but she’s not a typical representative of stay at home moms. She’s an amazing cook though!
One more bit of honesty. If one of my kids really did decide they want to coast in life—to forgo an intellectual or societal or family contribution of their own—well, I’d have a hard time with that on a personal level. I aspire to the message in Luke 12:48: From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. For my children, I pray they will lead impactful lives.
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Charlotte people! If you’re interested in literature or medicine, mark your calendars for two events this month.
APRIL 9, 2024:
Humanities + Healthcare, A Panel Discussion
Tue Apr 9, 7:45 pm - 9:30 pm BECHTLER MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, 420 South Tryon Street
What is Human-Centered Healthcare?
Charlotte physicians (Sapana Adhikari and Kimmery Martin) and a non-profit executive (Natalie Allen) explore the medical humanities and the arts as therapeutic intervention. What role do the arts and humanities play in medical education? How do the humanities help caregivers be better observers and interpreters? How do the arts help providers and patients with social and emotional learning components? Join in on the conversation!
The Charlotte Ideas Festival is a multi-day exploration of today’s pressing ideas and issues through the lens of the humanities. This year’s conversation-packed events feature a range of thinkers, innovators and community members engaged in connection and conversation. A program of The Charlotte Center for the Humanities & Civic Imagination, the Charlotte Ideas Festival is part of the three-week Charlotte SHOUT! festival celebrating Food, Art, Music, and Ideas.
APRIL 20, 2024:
The North Carolina Writer’s Network Spring Conference
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Building Suspense No Matter the Genre with Kimmery Martin
In this class novelist Kimmery Martin will offer 10 strategies to help you build and maintain suspense in your novel, no matter its genre . . . plus 5 suspense-killers you’ll want to avoid.
May 4, 2024:
Charlotte Author Conversation: May 4, 11-12:30 at the Pineville Library
505 Main St. Suite 100, Pineville NC
Join 6 award-winning Charlotte authors for a conversation about their recent books—what they’re about and how they wrote them—and hear their writing tips and lessons learned.
This author event is co-sponsored by Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and Charlotte Readers Podcast. Featured authors include Joy Callaway, Mark de Castrique, Kimmery Martin, Cathy Pickens, and Sarah Archer. The panel is moderated by author Landis Wade, founder of Charlotte Readers Podcast. The books and writing topics include mysteries, thrillers, historical fiction, true crime, romance, comedy, and literary fiction.
Hi Kimmery,
Isn't it weird that we (the collective "we") can still be at odds of over the roles of women. Why must the mommy wars persist? Like you, I have worked full-time, part-time, PRN, and not at all. There was a period when it was best for the family for me to not be working. When the time came for me to return to the work force, I went to nursing school and started my mid-life career in the ER. Which also happened to be my calling. I'm now retired from nursing and my daughters have their own families. They each have had different paths career-wise and it's what has been best for each of them. Your comment about women's lives being on a continuum is spot on.
Looking forward to more of your posts.
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