Shannon was looking blankly at the windows now, which seemed on these early winter mornings to offer a portal into a world shrouded in black. I knew she was thinking about the dreams. It was clear she didn’t even have an inkling of an idea of what they meant. How could she be so dense? God was clearly trying to reach her, in about as direct a way as He could, He was sending smoke signals and carrier pigeons and writing messages to her in the sky, and she was ignoring all of it. She’d probably schedule a call with some scam-artist dream interpreter before she even considered that her brain might be offering her a nonmetaphorical insight. It was a shame to watch her totally bypass revelation, but not exactly surprising. Shannon’s partially Barnard-educated brain was a blunt instrument, secular and smooth; it was about as suited a tool for speaking directly with God as a pair of rubber spatulas were for open-heart surgery.
And why might the Lord want to reach Shannon so badly?
Well. Shannon had misbehaved.
Shannon looked up at me, and our eyes locked. My cheeks flushed for having been caught staring at her with such an openly judgmental look on my face. “By the way,” she said, “my new phone arrived today. Thanks, again, for letting me do the rush shipping option.”
“Of course.” One of the children had dropped Shannon’s phone into a puddle, apparently, a week earlier. And because I was such a good boss, I’d remedied it immediately, handing her the company card to order a new one along with a little lighthearted joke:Wouldn’t want you to be stuck out here without access to the real world!
“Weren’t you going to wear the purple apron today?”
“Ah!” I said, and laughed. “Whoops! Pregnancy brain.” I hated that phrase,pregnancy brain,but it was an excellent way to sound relatable. The apron I was wearing was a dark navy. We were using these videos to announce a new shade option for the aprons on our online store ($35.99, 100 percent cotton, buttons made of recycled plastic, made in Spain). “I’ll go get it now.”
As I left the kitchen, Nanny Aimee walked in with my toddler, Junebug. Jessa got up from the table, her glass empty now, and trailed whimsically after me like a dandelion puff. She grabbed Junebug’s hand as she passed, and soon both nannies were calling plaintively after the little girls as they followed me up the stairs.
“It’s fine,” I called over my shoulder. “They can come with me.”
It was a particularly special gift from our Creator that we had been blessed with three girls in a row. All children were gifts from God, of course, butgroups of girls,little jewelry sets of two and three? That was something else altogether. A girl was lovely, a boy was nice, butgirls, plural,were rainbows and fluff, personified. Radiant balls of delight. Such community-oriented creatures; with the addition of each new little lady to their little-lady tribe, they all seemed to grow a little taller, glow a little brighter. They carried each other like dolls. They braided each other’s hair. They picked and preened and poked at one another with motherly obsession.
The boys would keep us fed when we were old and feeble, I liked to say, but the girls? They would dance around our wheelchairs,toss rose petals over our graves. Plus, I’ll admit it: they were easier to train. The boys occasionally resisted or got frustrated or bored, but not the girls. They could perform on film for hours without complaint, just like their mama.
“Mom.”
I winced instinctually, then rearranged my expression into softness. “Yes, honey?” I was standing in front of my bedroom mirror, fixing the new apron, and my eldest daughter, Clementine, was standing in the doorway. She had turned twelve over the summer and promptly stopped calling meMamaa few days after. It made my eye twitch each time I heard her sayMom;I hated the word. It was such an ugly sound, so short and masculine, far much less musical than my preferred alternative. I didn’t fight it, though. Clementine was a preteen, which meant she was testing me. The worst thing I could do would be to push back.
I watched through the mirror as Clementine crossed the room and sat next to the girls on my bed. “What does tradwife mean?”
Record scratch. “Who said that word to you?”
“What? Is it bad?”
“Tradwife,” Jessa said, and giggled. She threw her head back and said it again. “Traaaaadwife!”
It almost seemed possible Clementine might hear the mechanical clicks of my brain as it whirred into warp speed, sorting through five hundred possible answers to that question. My eldest daughter was like me, not just in likeness but in disposition, too: she held her intelligence like a knife behind her back. Now that she was creeping toward womanhood, I found our similarities a bit unnerving. Like watching a clone of myself walk slowly toward me from a faraway point in the distance: What would happen when she arrived?
I’m aware this isn’t the kind of thing you’re meant to feel about your own daughter. But motherhood is its own kind of curation. Which is to say: every woman I know lied to me about what it would be like, before I became one myself.
If your children became influencers someday, would you be proud of them?
“I just want my kids to be happy.”
Big gummy smile.
I opted for casual ambivalence. The worst thing you can ever do is let a child know you care. “I know thattradis short for traditional. Some people call women like me a traditional wife. For obvious reasons.”
By some people, I meant the Angry Women. The Angry Women were the ones who called me a tradwife, who saidtradlike it was short for something evil, liketraditionalwasn’t a fine word in any sane person’s universe. But these women were not sane, nor were they happy, nor were they big believers in personal accountability. Instead of asking themselves why they spent so much of their precious time on Earth scrolling through other people’s lives when they could be making their own home-cooked meals, or even offering eye contact to their own children—instead of asking themselves why they spent so much time bathing in their own rancid jealousy when they could be building their own lives into something they were proud of—they were apparently far more interested in drinking a bottle of wine each night and typing their little hearts out in online chat rooms about me. I suppose I’m assuming that these women were winos, but judging by the number of typos riddled throughout each of their messages, I’d call it an evidence-based assumption. Tradwives wereruuningthe country by staying married2therehusbands, apparently. Tradwives weredestoryinAmerica because they actually liked spending time with theircildrn.
To which I would comment, in one of the six rotating anonymous burner accounts I used online:Oh my goodness, heaven forbid!
Before these women called me a tradwife, they had called me a religious zealot, a cult leader, a breeder. Compared to those names, tradwife seemed mild.
“I don’t personally think celebrating traditions is bad,” I said. “Do you?”
The two littles shook their heads.No, Mama. We love you, Mama.But Clementine just stared at me. “So you’re saying you are one?”
I felt, suddenly, like I was being deposed for a lawsuit. “Clementine, why don’t you just tell me who told you I was a tradwife?”
“No one,” Clementine said. In a flash, she was bored. “I was just asking a question. Jeez.”
