Yesteryear #3
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 that trad is 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 said trad like it was short for something evil, like traditional wasn’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 were ruuning the country by staying married 2there husbands, apparently.
Tradwives were destoryin America because they actually liked spending time with their cildrn.
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.”
As she stood up, I faced my reflection again, busying myself with the apron bow. I wasn’t smiling anymore. “Tell Nanny Louise to look at the weather forecast,” I said to Clementine. “It might rain today. The children should wear boots.”
Clementine didn’t respond, and by the time I turned back around, she was gone.
Nannies. It had to be the nannies. They were constantly leaving their phones on countertops and couch cushions, no matter how many times I told them not to.
It was an overwhelming task, protecting your child from the world.
Jessa and Junebug were still so young, so impressionable—but Clementine?
Practically a woman now. She couldn’t be trusted.
Do your children enjoy being filmed?
“Oh! They love it.”
The plan for this Content Day was to make a boule with my famous sourdough starter and to depict a Nativity scene on the dough with herbs I’d personally picked from our garden.
This was, excuse the pun, my literal bread and butter.
Plus, the holiday season always led to a major boom for our online store (Yesteryear Ranch Cherry Cutting Board, $120, made in Brazil; Yesteryear Ranch French Salt Blend, $45, made in France; Yesteryear Ranch patented indoor paint gallons in shades of Homestead, Pioneer, and Cowgirl, $80 per gallon, all made in America).
The boule wasn’t the main attraction so much as the gateway drug: Baby Lavender Jesus in a Rosemary manger, three wise Thyme sprig men, fa la la and the followers would click, click, click, until their hearts—and their online shopping carts—were full.
They would beg—they were always begging—for more.
The herb boule took four hours. A standard amount of time, which would be clipped and snipped by Shannon into a thirty-second time lapse, my fingers spinning dizzily around the screen, packing and kneading and caressing a lump of pale dough.
The second half of the day was Natural Dinner.
I was going to make a traditional Sunday roast (or should I say a trad Sunday roast?
I planned to write in the caption, with a winky face; that would really drive the Angry Women up a wall).
All the ingredients would be sourced from our very own farm, except for the beef itself, which technically came from the supermarket on the other side of the mountain pass.
At some point in the early afternoon, we realized we were out of fresh eggs, so we decided to make a trip to the chicken coop.
The sky and the mountains performed beautifully for us.
I walked blissfully over to the coop, Jessa and Junebug clinging to my skirt as we mucked along in the mud and said hello to our ladies, which is what I called the chickens whenever I was being filmed. The ladies.
“Hello, ladies,” I sang out. “How are y’all doing today?”
Behind me, Shannon tripped on her video cord and swore loudly. “Sorry,” she said, “can you do that part again?”
Of course I could. I could do any of it on command, a million times over, in a million variations of singsong. “Hello, ladies! How are y’all doing today?”
“Perfect. Let’s move on to a shot of the egg pickup.”
“I say,” someone said from behind. “Is that Marilyn Monroe by the chicken coop?”
It might as well have been! I rolled my eyes and laughed, had a single moment to smooth my skirt and pray that Shannon was still filming before Caleb strode into the coop, grabbed me by the waist, and dipped me low.
He kissed me while our daughters cheered.
Then he lifted me back up, grinning as I slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “You got my boots all dirty!”
“Little dirt never killed anybody.” He tipped his cowboy hat to me and winked.
I laughed and rolled my eyes again. “We’re filming, Caleb.”
As if he didn’t know.
“Actually,” Shannon said, “we’re not. I paused right before Caleb spoke. So you guys are good. If you want to take a quick break, I can go have some coffee.”
“Oh,” I said, crestfallen. “Okay. Well, we don’t actually have to—”
But Shannon was already trudging away with the camera, walking quickly toward the house.
Caleb patted my behind twice, gently. As we watched Shannon throw open the front door with an unnecessary amount of force, he said, “She still upset?”
A surge of emotion rolled through me.
“Yes, Caleb. She’s still upset.”
“Well. She’ll feel better soon. When we—”
I looked at him, and he fell silent. “You don’t understand women at all.”
He was about to reply, and I was about to cut him off with an even sharper statement, and then both of us seemed to realize at the exact same time that we were being watched.
Jessa, Junebug. Little girls, sweet things, peering up at us. Watching, always. Where the hell was Nanny Aimee?
No matter. It was good practice, anyway.
That was what I told myself when I found myself under surveillance by a child who should’ve been under surveillance by someone else: It’s good practice!
A flawless performance, after all, does not arrive overnight.
It takes years—and years, and years—of practice.
I leaned forward on tiptoes and kissed Caleb twice in quick succession.
“Get back to work, cowboy.” The girls laughed and clapped, and I flushed from the reward.
Caleb tipped his hat to the three of us and strode back toward the barn, where he would probably spend an hour or two messing around with the organization of some hay bales.
Caleb was very good at keeping himself busy.
He was also very good at only ever doing the farm chores that he actually enjoyed: milking Sassafras, driving the big John Deere tractor around in tight donuts in the pastures, staying up all night with a laboring sow.
As for the chores he didn’t enjoy—cleaning, planting, picking, mucking out the stalls—he left all that to the ranch hands.
Hold on. You have ranch hands, too?
Pause.
“Did I not mention those before?”
Shit. Consider mentioning pregnancy brain.
“We have two or three, usually. Just seasonal work. Depending on what’s going on at the farm. We need as much help as we can get!”
But why didn’t you—
“Pregnancy brain!”