On Katie Britt’s performance of white, Christian motherhood (Or, how I grew up thinking I wanted to be a tradwife)

I thought I would grow up to have a life that looks like the one that Katie Britt portrayed in her rebuttal to the State of the Union last night. She pulled off a flawless performance of white, conservative Christian motherhood. I was 29 when I realized that I couldn’t live up to that ideal, and this devastated me because I had no other plan for my life.

I didn’t grow up with career aspirations or thinking definitively about what I wanted to be when I grew up, beyond being a wife and mother. This is not to say that I didn't have strong female role models. My own mother consistently pursued her own personal and career goals alongside playing the primary parent role in many ways and homeschooling me through elementary school. My paternal grandmother got her masters degree in the seventies as a mom of three tween boys and valued her career as an early elementary reading interventionist.

I saw plenty of women who seemed to do both parenting and “work” (as if parenting is not work). I also noticed how, in many cases, the woman’s career or personal aspirations seemed to have to be molded around the demands of parenting. I noticed how, in college, many of my female friends chose careers with flexible schedules because they assumed that they would have to mold their lives and ambitions around their future motherhood. Women choosing to become teachers because it’s convenient to have summers off with the kids. Women choosing to become nurses because the shift work makes it easier to organize childcare and the days they got to be home with their kids.

After my husband and I got married, I attended grad school knowing that as soon as I got pregnant and had a baby, I had no intentions of pursuing a career. He would financially support us as I focused all my attention and energy on the important job of raising our children and tending to the home. I could barely wait to live out the dream that I’d held for so many years, the peaceful happily ever after, the outcome of a life of obedience and faithfulness to God.

So imagine my shock when my worldview began to come apart at the seams as a Christian mother with an 18 month old baby experiencing a crisis of theology with a side of unprocessed birth trauma and a nagging case of untreated postpartum depression. I was unhappy and mired in shame, overwhelmed by the demands of domestic labor and motherhood while also working outside of the home. I loved my child, and I didn’t understand why I was unhappy, why I couldn't do what was required of me. I kept asking myself what was wrong with me.

I kept asking myself that for years, until I realized that for most of my life I had worked tirelessly to conform myself to an image of white, conservative Christian womanhood that never did contain me, internally. I molded my entire identity and how I showed up in the world around belonging to a group of people who would never allow me to be who I actually was. It took me 5 more years and 2 more kids to find the bravery to be honest about who I was and what I actually wanted and needed to be happy in my own life.

I could never have grown up to have a life that looks like the one that Katie Britt portrayed last night because that life doesn’t exist in reality, even for the women who align with her worldview.

We all have our secrets, the parts of ourselves that we shove into the shadow in order to continue to perform womanhood in that way, to find belonging in that culture. In Luke 8, Jesus says, "For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open."

In reality, there are so many ways to be a faithful Christian woman. There's no honest way to end this sentence: "Christian women don't (fill in the blank)." Because Christian women have all kinds of experiences and make all kinds of decisions, it's just that only some are considered acceptable to discuss in polite company.

In the Katie Britt version of motherhood, there are so many pieces of our lives and experiences that we aren't allowed to speak of. Let's bring them into the light so that we can live in alignment with who we really are, and trust that whatever we lose is worth losing to find wholeness.