Years ago I had this idea that I was going to stick some seeds in the ground and feed my family for a whole season. I was going to learn how to can and dehydrate my produce. I romanticized being self-sufficient. I wasn’t in the wrong exactly, I had the right intentions, but I had a lot to learn.
My gardens failed again and again. I tried starting seeds, I tried starting with little plants, I tried starting with full grown plants. I tried planting fruit trees and they died as well. I learned that just like us, where nutrition is complex, It is in the same way complex for growing plants as well. There’s a science to it and I didn’t have a clue.
In the end, I took a step back because I realized that I was wasting so much money that I was being counterproductive.
I can’t imagine being under the stress of knowing that if my garden didn’t make it my family didn’t eat. That my children’s nutrition depended on that season’s growth. One hailstorm, one frost, and you have dark days ahead.
Kitchens were hot and dangerous. Work was literally breaking your back, your fingers raw, your feet dead. And the only choice you had was to continue or starve.
What’s romantic about this picture? Why are tradwives turning this hardship into something to romanticize?
In my humble opinion, there are two main reasons.
One, it is because society has done what human nature tends to do. And that is to go from one extreme to the other. Fast food and boxed meals every night, glued to our phones, binge watching TV, only get a few hours a day with our kids between school (or daycare) and bedtime.
We went from dying because all we had was homemade medicine to relying on pills to survive instead of changing lifestyle habits. Giving our children toxic dyes and chemicals in our food and injecting them without reading inserts.
We can be tradwives without romanticizing hardship.
We can learn from the past while taking advantage of our modern blessings and not wasting opportunities to excel in ways we couldn’t before.
Two, I think if people were honest, it isn’t the hard work that people want to go back to but the togetherness of a family. Doing life together and working together as a family. That’s what people want again, not to go off to our separate ways and live separate daily lives.
“Tradwives”,
Buy those frozen vegetables and pre-made rolls and spend that time reading to your kids or playing a game.
Stay home mamas, put something quick in the crockpot and go spend time with your children. Find age-appropriate learning activities.
Use those packaged potatoes and sit down to work on your own personal growth. There’s so much information at our fingertips; science, history, the arts, Or learn how to grow those vegetables and use those herbs while using common sense and not romanticizing the pain our ancestors worked hard to overcome.
What do you think our ancestors would have done with the extra time on their hands if they suddenly had access to all the conveniences we do?
