Question: AITAH?
Answer: ESH
In case you have no idea what that means, a subreddit exists called AITAH — Am I The Asshole? Members explain a situation in which they thought they were right, but other people in their lives felt they behaved like assholes, so, they bring it to the internet to settle the debate. Like you do. The common replies are YTA (you’re the asshole) or NTA (not the asshole). But Redditors also see that middle answer: ESH (everyone sucks here). For the first 154 pages of Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer, all I could think was everyone sucks here.
Camille wants to be a trad wife, simply short for “traditional wife” but the role has more frightening, toxic implications. This is a real thing; you see trad wives on social media wearing beautiful dresses, walking around barefoot, collecting chicken eggs, baking bread, homeschooling their children, and serving their husbands. Camille was a twenty-year-old virgin when she met her husband, Graham, at a farmer’s market. He married her with the expectation that she would be a trad wife. The number of times Graham asks where his breakfast/lunch/dinner is will infuriate you. If Camille is dressed too casually, he’ll tell her to go change and put on makeup. And of course, what’s the point of being a trad wife if you don’t document it all on social media?
The ringleader in Camille’s social media world is Mara, a trad wife with eight children who doesn’t believe in silly things like vaccines or folic acid. You must grow your own food and serve your husband, who works to support you. Camille desperately wants to curate a life that mirrors Mara, and the most noticeable thing Camille lacks is a baby. But Graham has been distant, unwilling to be intimate with his wife (unless he “treats” her by offering himself for oral), and you can’t conceive a baby without your husband. Or can you?
After wandering beyond the wheat field behind their remote, farm-ish house (I write “ish” because trad wives love to pretend they are actual farmers), Camille finds a deep, bottomless well into which she throws a penny, manifesting a baby to complete her trad wife dreams. After, she is visited by an eye with wings in her dreams demanding to know why she wants a baby. When Camille asks Graham (a good Christian who obviously has a side chick) about angels, he explains that the Bible describes them as an eye with wings in some cases. A divine pregnancy! Of course!
And pregnant she is. Except the pregnancy develops faster than usual, and when the baby comes, it’s not what Camille (the reader is smarter) expects.
For those first 154 pages, I couldn’t stand Graham coming home for dinner whenever he felt like it, sleeping over and his “friend’s” house, leaving Camille in a remote home with no second car for her to leave, and telling her who and how to be. On the other hand, Camille’s excuses and wishes to be the person Graham demands is exhausting, too. You just have to wallow in their world to get situated for later stuff. Saratoga Schaefer writes in first-person point of view, and Camille sees herself as if she were describing a photo. Her skin is “sun-kissed,” she has “golden” locks, etc. — and this is from Camille’s POV, not an unknown narrator slathering on the cheese. I wanted to quit, to be honest, but a friend loaned me Trad Wife, and I wanted to finish.
Finally, when the baby comes and it’s not what Camille expects (haha, we could have warned her), things take off at a gallop. The angel (was that an angel?) starts to come around more, creeping out of the well and slithering up to the house while Graham is at work. A nosy neighbor — fellow stay-at-home mommy type — keeps stopping by, which makes it hard for Camille to hide the loose threads of her life. Meanwhile, Graham continues on after she’s given birth, wondering why she said no to a blow job, but sometimes he’s nicer. After she threw up at church, Camille explains, “He tells me not to worry about lunch; he’ll go meet his friends in town so I can rest in bed. ‘That way you’ll be right as rain and ready to cook dinner later,’ he says…”
It’s hard to not see where the book is going, but I still enjoyed the rollercoaster once it stopped click-clacking along to the top of the first hill. Of course, Camille is going to eventually say something to Graham about his expectations of her, and the final conversation between spouses is a treat: “He liked the cardboard-cutout version of me,” Schaefer writes, “that he could carry around and set up where he wanted. It must be shocking for him — as if a store mannequin suddenly came to life and called you a dick.” I’m guessing Schaefer writes from experience, as they note in their afterward that they, too, escaped a toxic relationship.
While enjoyed reading Trad Wife, I’m not sure I would pick up another mommy horror any time soon. I’ve read several lately, and it feels . . . old. Both Nestlings by Nat Cassidy and Suffer the Children by Craig DiLouie had similar vibes. I’m on the lookout for more horror with women that doesn’t focus on motherhood, birth, and feeding. One thing that Schaefer did differently is Trad Wife is basically set in a single location, much like a one-act play. Therefore, you feel closed in this space with the main character, making the story much more immersive.
Grab the Lapels 
Wow. This reminds me of the section about porn in the novel I’m Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom–one character says “no real woman can give you the frictionless relationship of a media-augmented jerk-off fantasy.” Sounds like that doesn’t stop some people from trying.
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Oh my gosh, what you just wrote totally reminds me of that section in the novel Gone Girl in which the main character talks about the trope of the “cool girl.” Basically, if the man is a dude-bro sports type, she can shove hot dogs down her throat and chug beer like nobody’s business while still being a size zero. She’s cool with him watching sports all day because she’s a cool girl. If he’s the hippie type, she’s got white lady dreads and is totally into tofu or whatever. Basically, the cool girl doesn’t exist because the cool girl is someone who just shapes herself into a jerk-off fantasy.
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Yikes. This was one that made the “whoo, boy” alarm go off in my head, LOL. I’m glad it picked up steam and delivered (!) something for you in the end.
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I 100% love that you still remember “hoo boy.” 🤣
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The trad wife concept is pretty horrific even without the motherhood horror thrown in. Glad it finally paid off in the end at least.
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I feel like you are the antithesis to trad wives, doing the real work they don’t want to and being an amazing person who tries to be self-sustaining in the process.
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Aw, why thank you! *blush* There’s a pretty good book I read quite a few years ago called Radical Homemakers https://archive.org/details/radicalhomemaker0000haye that the trad wives might benefit from. But then the whole trad wife thing is not truly about homemaking, at it’s core it’s about controlling women.
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I thought being a trad wife, at least now, was more about social media clout. If you don’t have a YouTube web channel or an Instagram to document your perfect farm-y life, are you even a trad wife?
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Ah yes, that makes a lot of sense. It’s about performance, which makes me wonder just how many of them actually believe in the things they are performing. I imagine they must to some extent? But also, it must really chafe too.
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I’ve seen a couple of programs about the Trad Wife movement – can you call it that – in the US. We probably have them here too, but perhaps not quite enough to be visible, and our overall political situation is not as conservative as yours is now. You talked about nearly giving up, and said that “You just have to wallow in their world to get situated for later stuff”. I will happily wallow if the writing is good, if there’s freshness to the way things are told that I get joy from that while I wait for the story to reveal itself. I’m not sure whether that’s the case here or now. And anyhow, when I hear “mommy horror” I think well probably not for me, regardless. I did greatly enjoy reading your post though.
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There is SO much mommy horror right now! I think that being a mom sounds petty wild in general, and now that women are writing about it, readers are eating it up. I’m surprised there isn’t a horror novel based on just pregnancy and birth.
I kind of assumed that if a woman in Australia put on a dress and “played farming,” the rest of Australia would eat that person alive for being so phony. You guys are known for your tough outdoorsyness, so pretending to be an outside gal would get you fed to the gators.
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Haha Melanie, I don’t think we are that tough, but our culture is probably generally more down to earth and atheistic for much of this to develop her. I think!!
We do have people who hobby farm but that’s different to what you are talking about isn’t it.
I saw a current affairs program last year on those families in America and the thing that most got me beyond the whole non-feminist aspect was women (well one in particular that they interviewed) putting their lives at risk believing their duty was to have more and more babies. I couldn’t understand how she thought producing more babies at risk to herself was more important than bringing up the ones she already had. I mean, don’t children need their mums? Isn’t your womanly role – in their thinking – to raise kids as well as produce them?
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I think the main difference is there are traditional families, typically strictly religious, that believe women are the helper to Men, they shouldn’t use birth control, and they shouldn’t be in the workplace. This trad wife movement is more about how you appear online. It’s romanticizing motherhood and farm life in a way that’s highly unrealistic and problematic.
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Ah … yes, I see. I think it was more the former the program I’m referring to was about.
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What this most reminded me of was an author you recommended to me very early on – Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the expectations placed on her by her doctor husband. I think she left him eventually and abandoned the child.
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I actually know nothing about Perkins Gilman’s personal life, which is a total shame. I find her books titillating in the most feminist way. The characters are never violent or vengeful, but they sure do put others in their place. In Trad Wife, the wife basically went feral in the end, and I was so pleased. If you can access it, check out the story “The Caveman in the Hedges” by Stacey Richter.
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Ok, I have checked out some summaries of Caveman. They don’t say whether she got dragged off by her hair.
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This sounds interesting even if it takes some effort to get into. The trad wife phenomenon is a weird one and I’ve been glad to see some growing backlash against it recently.
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Is there backlash? I don’t hear much about it other than most people think it’s stupid; however, one has an online opinion about stupidity affected people with strongly held beliefs?
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More that people are realizing how manufactured it is. That it isn’t possible to homeschool 8 kids and make bread and run a farm and wear beautiful dresses all the time. Those influencers have help or they aren’t actually doing all the things they say they are.
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