You wake up in the morning and you search through ads for a job that will pay enough for daycare, the gas to get there, and enough left over afterward to make it worth the time you’ll lose with your last baby. But once again there are none willing to pay that much. So you spend hours calculating your budget, counting coupons and figuring out loop poles just to make ends meet.
This was never the plan.
You downsized, you moved out of town. You bought land and a fixer upper. You saved money every chance you had.
You started gardening. You got chickens. You bought things used and you didn’t worry about brand name or brand new.
All so you could stay home and raise your kids. Have those moments, those memories. You cook, you clean, you do everything that they say a traditional wife is supposed to do and at one time it would’ve been enough.
Your husband works hard, usually quite a bit more than 40 hours a week. He also works on the side, when he can. He works a physically demanding man’s man job, the kind of job that requires working with your hands. He fixes things for a living and as hard as he’s worked and as much as you’ve planned, you should be OK. But you’re not.
So you get small jobs on the side, jobs that teach you quickly about pyramid schemes. You sell consignment and online. No big deal and it works for a little while.
You realize that every woman you know is out here trying to make money on the side while having no extra to spend. Every woman you know is constantly calculating the value of every hobby, every creative outlet, every spare minute, and many of them work jobs outside the home as well.
You realize you’re just like the little boy with his finger in the crack in the dam. Everything kept getting more expensive and your husband‘s paycheck only increased in quarters per hour, which wasn’t enough to match the increase in the cost of living, which seemed to increase by hundreds of dollars per hour. No that’s not the exact number or statistic but all you know is you aren’t keeping up.
You watched as people you knew your whole life had to sell their family farms. You watched as family owned companies and businesses in the town that you’ve lived your entire life in were taken over by large corporations owned by people in unknown cities far away.
You watch the woods around you grow smaller and smaller. Trees chopped down for corporate owned beef farms, and the food to feed them. In just a decade nearly every flat or semi-flat piece of land in every direction for 100 miles has been made void of almost every tree. But no one seems to be able to understand why the weather just keeps getting worse around here.
Of course this isn’t the farmers fault, it’s just the last resort to keep their farms one more year. You don’t know much about farming but beef from Argentina seems like a slap in the face.
The guilt and the shame of not making enough money sits on your shoulders like bricks. It weighs on you as you try to make the most of the time that you have with your children. You want to give them some sort of stability in a world of constant chaos, but everyday it gets harder.
You keep seeing the videos about how more women need to be like you: traditional wives.
Women who know how to cook and clean and raise children and above all support their husbands in their career.
They tell you that this is who you are. They tell you that you are lucky and that you should be happy and content. They tell you that you are living the dream.
But you know that it’s all bullshit.
I write all this because I am a traditional housewife in almost every sense of the word in the eyes of the modern Republican Party.
I wanted to be a stay at home mom who gardened and cooked and put away food that I canned myself. I knit and sew. I have three children. This wasn’t because I believed that this is where I was meant to be simply because I am a woman but because I, personally, enjoy these things.
I am still a stay at home mom but I’m constantly in and out of a state of financial insecurity. What once was the lower bracket of the middle class is now a sort of ever expanding “ditch” trapping the bulk of society between middle and low. People who make just enough to not qualify for any type of assistance (food stamps, medicaid, preschool, etc), at least on paper, but don’t make enough to ever get ahead. Going backwards is pretty simple but going forwards is damn near impossible.
I have always tried to live a life that runs parallel to that which is good for the planet. I never wanted a big house or even a big life. I’m easily satisfied with the simple things. My dream was to live in a cabin in the woods where I lived as sustainably as possible. (Of course this is where things veer away from the MAGA dream of a woman.)
I also really enjoy reading and learning. Things which MAGA also fears. Most importantly I believe that if a woman doesn’t want to have kids that’s entirely up to her and that’s where MAGA would probably rather my mouth be sewn shut.
I started out as a young mother who learned the truth while living it and that truth is that this country and the men running it don’t really want traditional wives.
They don’t even understand what that is.
The MAGA movement wants people to believe that to be a traditional housewife is as beautiful and natural as the well scripted videos made by former models. Models who made six figure paychecks before “retiring” to raise a family. They now make six figure paychecks making videos of themselves churning butter in designer dresses made for the rich to cosplay as “down home country folk”.
When JD Vance and Mike Johnson stood behind bulletproof glass and spoke about the need for women to go back home at a pro-life rally, they tried to make it sound as though they were going to create a world where it would not only be possible but preferable.
They lied.
They want you to go home and take care of the kids, sure, but then they want you to stay up all night trying to figure out how to make ends meet.
Try to figure out how to make a paycheck on the side without ever letting it get in the way of being a wife and a mother.
Another attribute of this seemingly male centered fantasy is that it actually hurts the men who have been convinced this is all to their benefit. The desired effect is that the men will then be too tired and too stressed to figure out where to really direct their anger. All because we no longer live in a country that one paycheck can afford. Men who have done all the things they’ve been told a man is supposed to do by working physically hard, demanding jobs, never taking holidays or ever slowing down and then being told that it’s their fault when it’s still not enough.
It’s all part of the plan. They want you too tired and too stressed to ever upset the status quo. Then they want all those kids you had, because they made birth control so hard to get, to grow up and do the very same thing. Work hard, never get ahead, always be too tired to fight back.
The one paycheck household is a dead American dream.
Unless you’re willing to do things that are borderline illegal or completely unethical. Or yeah sure, you get really fucking lucky. Of course no one ever wants to acknowledge how much luck plays into our lives. Like getting an inheritance or being born with the “white” skin color.
But that’s an entirely different essay.
It’s a hard truth for many to acknowledge but there has never been a true traditional housewife.
Not in the way that these politicians and absolute grifters are describing.
MAGA loves old shows like Gunsmoke and Little House on The Prairie. They love to glorify a time that none of them remember. When men were men and women were background characters.
But Ma Ingalls worked. So did Laura. In the books and in the show.
And Miss Kitty?
They just didn’t make as much as a man and all their work did was make the men’s lives easier and more comfortable. Also, they almost never received any credit for it.
The meaning of a traditional wife to the MAGA movement is just a doormat with a working uterus.
Nothing else matters to them.
A big part of my life as a “trad wife” and mother is to make sure that my daughter does not follow in my footsteps.
For one thing, I had children too early. I wasn’t educated enough on how the world really works, and for another I know now that being young and a bit selfish is a necessary stage of life for anyone to figure out who they are and what they want.
But most importantly she has to understand that this country, no matter what its “leaders” say, is not a place to safely and securely raise a family. Not anymore.
Really allowing parents (either parent) the choice to stay at home and care for our children would necessitate better healthcare, a realistically livable minimum wage, and laws which might prevent unnecessary inflated costs of necessary goods and services by large corporations which are not just monopolies unto themselves, but have monopolized our government as well.
There are lots of us, myself included, that would love to live in a world where that was a choice one could make, but sadly here in America it no longer is. I have loved being a mother and I have loved the time the I have been able to have with my kids.
But the shadow of financial insecurity has often clouded much of the experience. Instead of peaceful and “natural” it has often been tiresome and struggle filled.
As a mother, this is the last thing you want for your children.
A life with little choice and no end of struggle in sight.
Being a mother can be a beautiful experience but not here. Not anymore.
A Hermitess 