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.

Taken by my oldest son in 2003, before the events mentioned above. We smile with the most authenticity when someone we love is taking the photo.

The answer I sent her still haunts me.