Help, I’m Obsessed With Trad Wife Influencers!

Maybe this is the kind of life I would have had if I had just done a few things differently.

A home that doesn’t belong to any of the trad wives I follow…as far as I know. Photo by Bertrand Bouchez on Unsplash

No matter where you run, you cannot hide from the realities of our cruel, cold world. I should know. Over the past 10 months I’ve tried everything: Spending money, spending less money, doing yoga, riding my dumb stationary bike, watching Gossip Girl. But at the end of the day, when I am still in my stupid little apartment and my brain is still on fire, I do have one last outlet I turn to to avoid the crushing reality of, well, everything: My trad wife influencers.

Lucky for me, my two best friends went to a small liberal arts college with a woman who became a devout wife, mother, and follower of Christ. This woman lives in the midwest, spends her days as a homemaker and homesteader, and also runs a fairly popular Instagram account where she proselytizes the wholesome goodness of a simple, God-driven lifestyle—cooking for her family, sewing aprons and skirts she sells on Etsy, reading the Bible cover to cover, and putting hand-knit bonnets on her sons’ heads. The whole thing feels very Little House on the Prairie.

Her life is so simple! She bakes oat muffins and grain-free quiche and she cans pears to save for the winter. She lights tall, tapered candles and puts them around her house during the day—like, when it is still light outside. She makes big, hearty meals for dinner. She had a birthday party for one of her sons during Covid and wrote a batshit post explaining her decision to host a big indoor gathering for him. (“Isolation has created more mental sickness than it has prevented physical sickness. We must be careful, but not so careful that we lose the ones we love. We may never know how important it is for a child to see their grandparents on their birthday.”) She wears ankle-length skirts out in the snow. In one post, she talks about flushing out theory she learned in college from her brain and replacing it with scripture.

My friends mentioned this woman so much that she became a spectral fourth member of our group chat, so I became one of her many tens of thousands of Instagram followers. Then my friend Kate wrote an article about how following this woman’s follies made her want to go full trad wife (A trad…