The day my grandmother Amanda died, I wandered around the mall for a few hours. It wasn’t that we went to malls often, or even at all. But I didn’t want to sit in grief. I wandered around, touching cheap fabric and swatching bright lipsticks. Then, I went to my closing shift at work.

My grandmother didn’t have a job. She was a homemaker who spent her time baking and sewing dresses that fell below the knees. My mother chose a different path: a firefighter paramedic. There were arguments between them about motherhood and the role of a woman in the household. The resolution was years of silence.

Then, she was dying and asked for my mother’s help. She only wanted her.

*

The day she died, I went to my shitty college job bringing out groceries to people’s cars. I go back and forth on whether this job truly mattered.

Maybe, by carrying out fifteen ripping plastic bags of ingredients, I was part of some beautiful meal that helped bring a family closer.

Or maybe I was better off being ignored, gestured at through a driver side window to get the job done.

*

The funeral was around ten minutes on Zoom.

About eight minutes consisted of a video from her Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall explaining how death is great because eventually we will all reunite. A staged, blond family drank pale lemonade as the video suggested that we should all be happy to watch someone leave us. Our sadness will not matter when the whole world is destroyed by flames and we, assumingly not sinners, sit under a pavilion like no arguments had ever kept us apart.

When we returned to live footage of the Kingdom Hall, I saw my mom walking down the aisle with a tissue pressed to her eyes.

*

My grandmother and her husband used to call us to read the bible. I didn’t really understand what was happening. We didn’t hear from her often, so these calls felt like they came from a magical, faraway place.

*

Tradwives are defined by their connections to religion, patriarchy, and motherhood. All of these interweave and become each other. “The head of the woman is the man,” says the bible (1 Corinthians 11:3), and it appears Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm do, too.

They are constantly cooking for their husbands in pristine homes, wearing big, expensive, flowy dresses. Every meal is a husband’s favorite, prepared with babies clinging to their ankles. Each child is a gift that God has been patiently doling out, year after year.

*

My grandmother stayed at home while her husband drove a school bus. All her clothes were made by hand and she was known as the person to go to for a baby shower cake. And it made her happy. I wonder what she would have done if that was not her life.

But it was. So why do I keep coming back to it? Does it matter?

I think there is some fear in my body that wanting that life means giving up on yourself. And there is some truth to that. We have seen ballerinas stay home to cook instead of dancing on stage.

Choice feminism says that after being pushed around for so long, a woman can choose between a career or homemaking. Performing or baking. Babies or celibacy. Either choice is valid because a woman should not be judged for how she chooses to live her life. Both the choice itself and the ability to choose should be celebrated.

It made her happy. If there was choice, and I hope there was, I never saw her upset by it.

*

I dated someone at nineteen who wanted me to be a mother. At one point, while trying to convince me, he said that he would watch the hypothetical baby while I worked. I could have a career while he was the homemaker, as in I could have some agency over my life after having created one.

I thought about him speeding down crowded roads in rage, punching the chair and air I occupied, and the way he threw literal tantrums when his canker sores hurt. I had cooked for him and cleaned his apartment, which I didn’t even live in, thinking that I performed those acts out of love. Wasn’t I, inherently, the calm one, the clean one, the better one between us? I had become a mother as a result of my environment and out of fear of what would happen if I didn’t.

I realized there was still a choice, and I took it. I left.

*

Yes, a woman should not be judged for the choices she makes for her life. But hasn’t one option always been the ingrained, expected life? Is it still a choice if one option has been designed with you in mind, perfected by the generations before you and built into the sociocultural fabric you are expected to weave into?

I bake cookies for myself while asking is this a choice or a submission to the system?

I don’t know. I’m scared to be wrong. Or to be made complicit.

*

Once, when my grandmother lived with us as children, she made cookies. She would swat her husband away, he would come back, and they would giggle together. There was comfortable, safe love in the kitchen.

*

In response to the “Tradwives, Why?” question under the :r/AskWomenNoCensor subreddit, women give varying reasons for why they would seek out tradwife life. Some say that the workload is easier, that the lifestyle works with women’s hormonal cycles, or even that they just like doing laundry.

Beyond that thread, some shame the social media tradwife movement as being a sham or unrealistic. I think this is a fair assessment. Many TikTok tradwives seem to be dressed in luxury apparel and surrounded by Le Creuset cookware. Their content is edited to be slow, lush and peaceful. There is never a crying baby in the background or spit up on a dress collar.

But the reality of the social media tradwife movement is that the same labor onscreen is required offline. I know that Ballerina Farm will be tending to her house whether I am watching her or not. That life and expectations are set.

*

The introduction at the funeral mentioned that my grandmother made ties for her husband that would match her dresses. It was a small mention, sandwiched between verses about how God would let us see her again one day.

But that isn’t enough. I want to see the matching fabrics and ask how she made the patterns. She would have told me. There would be no God in her answer. Just love.

*

After she died, I painted my nails pale pink and added floral stickers from Walmart. It felt like something she would have liked to see.

*

I think about Nara Smith and her perfectly manicured hands. Everything about her is polished and appealing to the eye. There used to be a time when women were expected to be like this at every moment. It would be shameful to be seen without lipstick or a perfect curl. My grandmother tried to convince everyone that her hair was still naturally red at sixty.

My partner wakes up to me with my bangs floating above my forehead. I snore and probably kick him in my sleep. Am I shameful? Do I want to be seen as beautiful even when I can’t see it for myself? Does it matter?

*

I miss my grandmother and I judge her at the same time. I use what she has taught me and wonder what else she could have been. It feels unfair to do, but I am critical even in grief.

I don’t think that my life is more fulfilling than hers was. Why, then, do I think that she should have had more?

*

I was trying to take in the waist of a skirt by sewing the elastic. I hadn’t used my grandmother’s machine since the pandemic, when she mailed us handmade masks and my baby pictures, but I felt confident I knew the solution.

After an hour of frustration, the bottom thread still wasn’t getting pulled up. The stitches were bunching and clotting in the needle plate. I was frustrated with the old machine. It was hers. She would have known how to fix the problem, and she would have done it nimbly and efficiently. As if it were an extension of herself.

I couldn’t call her for help.

It was like some special piece of knowledge had been taken out of the world. Of course there were Google searches and manuals that would remind me about thread tension and stitch length. But I know she would have had a story about problems the machine had given her in the past and questions about what I was planning to make. There is no heart in a Google search, no squeeze of the shoulder telling you that this problem hasn’t needled itself into your life only. That this broken machine is familial and needs our gentle touch to be fixed.

*

She taught me to use a fork to mix while baking. Everything would get caught up in a whisk, but a fork always stayed open. She was right; it works like a charm.