Former Tradwife Talks Lifestyle’s Harsh Realities: ‘I Don’t Want My Daughters To Be In A Marriage Like This’
A former tradwife is spilling the tea on the harsh realities of the controversial lifestyle.
As you may know, a tradwife is a name for women following traditional marriage roles, where they are the homemakers who raise the children, maintain the house, cook, and clean while their husbands are the breadwinners. Over the years, the lifestyle has become more and more of a trend, with popular tradwife influencers showing on social media platforms like TikTok their homemaking routines. Often, that includes videos of them making food from scratch and taking care of their kids.
While many of the content creators present a picture-perfect life to the public, we all learned through a Times of London profile on tradwife influencer Hannah Neeleman , it can be anything but. Even Enitza Templeton, a former tradwife, can tell you there’s a lot of “ugliness behind the scenes” of these types of marriages! She lived the lifestyle for a decade, so she knows that better than anyone else!
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Enitza got married to her husband back in 2009 and decided to follow stereotypical gender norms, which saw her cleaning, cooking, and caring for the four kids they eventually had. But slowly over 10 years, she realized the tradwife lifestyle wasn’t what she wanted for herself anymore – nor that she wanted for her three daughters in the future. The social media personality told People on Tuesday:
“I remember watching TV, folding the towels thinking, ‘I wish anybody could help me out of this. If I had the money, if I had the means, if I had some way, I would not be married. I hate this. I don’t want my daughters to be in a marriage like this.’ If I want my daughters to do any different, I’m going to have to show them different. From that moment on, I started to make more and more changes in my life until I finally left.”
Years after turning things around for herself, Enizta is horrified that the life she once lived is a viral trend for many young women online. After watching the TikTok videos, she sees “so many parallels between our lives and stories” and can “hear the sadness” in the tradwife creators voices:
“I see their deep, deep, deep desire to validate the lifestyle and to be like, ‘Look at me. I’m so perfect and beautiful, and I do all these things amazingly.’ It’s super sad. It’s also a little bit disingenuous. I know what it’s like. You’re not showing the full picture. There is a lot of ugliness behind the scenes.”
As Enitza pointed out, for starters, the whole idea of the “perfect trophy wife” is an impossible goal. Because no matter who you are, what you do, or how hard you try, nobody’s perfect at the end of the day. That is just facts:
“It’s just this little dangling carrot to keep you trying to be this perfect trophy wife. She’s beautiful, she has the children, she does it unmedicated. It’s this stupid, stupid, stupid goalpost that’s always moving. You can never reach it because if you bake the bread, well, did you use fresh yeast? Oh. Well, did you mill the flour? Oh. Well, did you grow the wheat that you milled the flour? They can keep pushing it back.”
And as we said, Enitza knows firsthand the “ugliness” in this lifestyle. Recalling her experience as a tradwife, she told People that she was a 26-year-old college graduate with a graphic design degree when she tied the knot with her younger husband. When the couple started the tradwife lifestyle, they didn’t have much money and made ends meet with his student loans. Her husband was an aspiring entrepreneur and also tried to get income through jobs like animal trapping, web design, and working at a grocery store.
According to Enitza, they agreed he would be the primary provider while she cooked and cleaned. They both shared a goal of having “as many kids as we can,” with her being the main one raising their children. However, she wasn’t always just a homemaker. At first, Enitza said she helped with their finances by working in graphic design and human resources. However, when she was laid off from her HR job while pregnant with their first child, they decided to fully pivot toward traditional gender roles.
But even when she worked, the money she made wasn’t for herself. She had zero control over it, as her husband had full control over their shared bank account:
“If [I] wanted to save up for something, like a trip to Greece or something, I didn’t have the abilities to do that. It’s not like I could be like, ‘Oh, well I’m gonna transfer some money into my savings account.’ That just wasn’t a thing.”
Enitza went on to give birth to four children (most without an epidural) — one son and three daughters — and become the sole caregiver. No matter how exhausted or sick she was, which was pretty often, she shared that she constantly kept up with the responsibilities of being the tradwife. Enitza would keep up with her appearance every day, wearing dresses, putting on makeup, and straightening her naturally curly hair. In addition to feeding her husband and kids, she maintained the home, home schooled the children, made bread, grocery shopped, and went on an outing to the library. Enitza said:
“That’s it. Just cooking meals, taking care of kids and tending to everybody else’s needs. That was the whole day.”
Her routine became harder when her second child was born with Down syndrome and a heart defect, requiring multiple surgeries. Yet that did not stop the two from growing their family:
“I was having a baby that was having open heart surgery, but I was still pregnant with another one. And then pregnant with another one, and another open heart surgery. And then trying to homeschool one of them and trying to keep this one alive with her oxygen and then pregnant with the next one.”
While Enitza’s daughter was “teetering between life and death,” she was managing another pregnancy, homeschooling, weighing her daughter every day to make sure she hit the optimal weight for surgery, and making meals from scratch. And as you can imagine, it becomes exhausting. Looking back, Enitza recognizes she never should have hit the brakes on expanding their family as it was “not sustainable” or “appropriate” at the time.
It wasn’t until she spent time with normal moms at her daughter’s Girl Scouts event that she started to realize all the red flags in her tradwife lifestyle:
“It was the first time I was hanging out with women that were a little bit above my socioeconomic class, women who did have businesses and who were told, ‘You can do anything. You don’t have to be a wife. They knew I had four kids and the baby was just now old enough to be home. I was like, ‘Oh, I think we’re going to start talking about having our next baby.’ And they were like, ‘No, no,’ They spoke to me so bluntly and honestly … They were like, ‘Aren’t we having fun? You’re going to put all this on pause again?’”
Once Enitza realized she was done with her marriage, she decided to get her “ducks in a row” and took on two nursing jobs before she left. Obviously, the mom getting a job doesn’t adhere to the traditional wife rules. But she got her hubby to agree to it under the guise she wanted to help make extra income for the family and her mental health.
Eventually, after a massive fight between them, Enitza asked for a divorce. Five years later, no longer following the tradwife lifestyle, creates TikTok content and runs her Emerging Motherhood podcast. These days, she is feeling “younger” and “more regenerated” than ever:
“When you see a problem and you feel like you have a solution, it’s your responsibility to do something. I felt like as a mom, it’s my job to clear the path for my daughters. And I have to make as much of an impact as I can for them. I don’t want them to grow up in a world like this.”
Wow.
Enitza did not hold back! We applaud her for sharing her story. Reactions, Perezcious readers? Sound off in the comments below!
[Image via Enitza Templeton/Instagram]
