Trad Wife or Grad Life

A note before I leave for London.

My suitcase is mostly packed on the bed, and I keep walking past it to write this down instead.

In a few hours, I fly to London to teach a room of young women about resilience, how to stand in uncertainty without losing themselves. The thing I can't stop turning over, the thing I want to say to them before I board, is about a story that keeps finding them first.

You've seen it. The soft-focus kitchen. The sourdough rising on the counter. The message underneath, sometimes gentle and sometimes not: come home, have the babies, let someone else carry the weight of the world. Have more children than you planned, sooner than you're ready, and trust that the structure will hold you.

I teach at a women's college. I watch this current move through young women who are bright and searching, and I understand why it lands. I want to be careful here, because the easy thing is to mock it, and mockery misses what's actually happening.

The pitch works because it presses on something true.

The longing beneath it is real and old. The desire to love. To nurture. To belong to something larger than yourself, and to be of use to people you can actually touch. That ache is one of the truest things a person carries, and it deserves better than to be conscripted into someone else's argument. Anyone selling you a life is counting on that ache. The honest ones and the dishonest ones both know exactly where it lives.

So the question is never whether the longing is real. It's what someone wants you to do with it.

The tell is the binary

I've learned to notice something over the years. When a person hands you two doors and says pick, the framing itself is the sleight of hand. Trad wife or girlboss. Babies or degrees. The moment a choice arrives pre-severed like that, some part of you should go quiet and alert. Call it discernment, the oldest intelligence you have. Someone who profits from your decision has already narrowed the room before you even walk into it.

The trad-wife script says hand your authority to a husband and a household. The career script that raised my generation said hand it to a firm and a ladder. Those look like opposites. They are the same move in different clothes. Both ask you to locate the meaning of your life somewhere outside yourself, inside an institution that will define your worth and, when it suits them, withdraw it.

I raised three children who are in college now. Let me say this plainly. Mothering is the hardest thing I have ever done. It is the daily practice of setting another person's needs ahead of your own, over and over, for decades, and it asks a depth most jobs never touch. That is exactly why it cannot be handed to you by a stranger on the internet who needs your fertility for their cause. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and no one rushing you toward the pouring has any real interest in whether your cup is full.

The interior work comes first, because it is load-bearing. You build the self that can hold a life before you give that self to anyone.

The floor that was never poured

There's a practical truth under all of this, and it's the part that made me angry enough to write.

We are asking young women to have more babies in a country that has built almost nothing to catch them when they do. The United States remains the only wealthy nation, the only member of the OECD, with no guarantee of national paid leave for new mothers in the private sector. Not a protection that was recently repealed. A floor that was never poured in the first place.

So when people say the rules don't work for working mothers, they are being too kind. There aren't many rules. There's a patchwork that shifts at every state line, and many women only discover the gaps once they're standing in one.

I've stopped waiting for that floor to arrive from above. I don't believe it's coming soon, and I don't believe it's coming from the same people currently telling women what to do with their bodies.

An absence, though, is also an opening. If the structure doesn't exist, then building it is the work, and the work is ours. Co-ops. Childcare shared between families who trust one another. Businesses designed from the studs up to hold a parent rather than penalize one. Arrangements invented by the women who actually need them, instead of being inherited from institutions that never had us in mind. This is entrepreneurship in its oldest sense, and it's the most alive I've ever seen my students become.

Grad life

There's a third move the binary hopes you won't make. You can walk out of the building entirely and turn around to see who built it and why.

That's what I mean by grad life. Not a degree for its own sake. The deeper thing an education is supposed to hand you: the capacity to understand history, to see the systems you were born into, to trace who benefits from them, and then to decide, from your own center, what you will do with the one life you have.

Writing about the ancient mystery schools in The Lost Art of Resurrection, Freddy Silva quotes the old Gnostic answer to every system built on keeping people asleep: "Knowledge is freedom." The line reaches us through the Gospel of Philip. And it's worth remembering that graduation and commencement mean the same thing, and the thing they mean is a beginning.

Part of your work might be motherhood. It might be all of it. It might be none. That was never the question, and it was never anyone else's to answer. What matters is that you choose it awake, from a full Self, rather than abdicating the choice to a spouse or a boss or an algorithm that needs you to stop asking questions.

What I'm packing

So I'll finish loading that suitcase, and when we convene for our first day of class together at Regent’s University in London, I'll stand in front of those young women, and here is what I want them to carry out of the room.

Resilience is real, but it grows from a deeper root. You become resilient by becoming sovereign: by knowing who you are so completely that the binaries lose their grip, and the storms, when they come, meet something in you that will not move.

Few are telling young women this. Not the trad-wife accounts, not the career machine, not the institutions that would prefer them compliant in one direction or the other.

So I'll tell them. And then I'll help them build the thing that makes it true. Neither door was ever the path. That one is quieter. It's the whisper your own soul keeps making under all the noise, waiting for you to trust it enough to listen.