What It's Really Like To Be a Trad Wife
The haunting complicity of lifestyle evangelism
In 2006, a year before my escape, a friend of mine reached out for marital advice. I read her plea on my laptop from the corner of the closet I used as a makeshift office.
In front of me, on the wall, I’d tacked a bulletin board plastered with goals written on post-it notes: write a book, hike the AT, take the kids to the library, subscribe to the New York Times. These goals were equally out of reach; I was a trad wife living in Christian Patriarchy, in church-sanctioned domestic abuse. My friend’s husband was hitting her and freezing her out for days at a time. She knew something of my situation and wanted to know how I coped, because when last we spoke in 2004, my volatile marriage had gone through a change I’d been vague about, and two years later, I was still married. “I want to know what you did that worked,” she wrote.
The answer I sent her still haunts me.
