I think it's hard in the suburban setting to create a life that is based on rooted affection because rootedness isn't characteristic of suburban living. I lived in the NC suburbs for 20 years and only once ran into someone I knew at a store or shopping mall. People came for jobs, then moved on to better ones elsewhere. Even the physical character of the community was in constant transition: this month's daylily farm was next month's earthmover convention and two months later, a new crop of apartments was beginning to poke up from the red clay soil.
I moved back home to small town Maine eight years back and discovered that the semirural town where my family has a 3rd generation farm was also being turned into a suburban community. Fewer and fewer people lived "in" it; more and more were living transiently "on" it. They left their newly constructed houses in the morning to drive 30 or 60 or 90 minutes to work and returned long after what I'd consider supper time. The downtown is filled with restaurants (although mostly not corporate brands) and the kind of boutique shops where you can pay $300 for a table lamp. The amenities I grew up understanding to be part of what government supports are now fee-based weights on family budgets: singing in the school chorus, performing in the school plays, going to the summer morning recreation programs that used to be a weary mom's summer respite.
I can still find remnants of our small town life here. The guy who lives in the condo a few doors down? His mother grew up down the road from the farm where my mother grew up. Those cool paintings in my kitchen and stairwell? They're by my middle school friend Margaret. Ed. in my square dance club, is the father of a childhood friend of my church's worship pastor. Garden club friend Jeanne's son went to prom with my sister. Almost everyone knew my Uncle Percy and worked his blueberry fields. Almost everyone knows my brother Don ("He's such a great guy!") The guy who fixes my car (from a big garage attached to his house) won't let me walk home while I wait for the repair but drives me ("They're crazy out there in this weather. I don't want you to get hit.") And I quite often run into people I know at the supermarket or downtown.
This is, to me, the stuff of an authentic life built on affection for a place and its people. But it can only happen when people choose to live in their place and to make its people their own.
When I lived in Boston, one of my friends accused me of living in the city as if it was a village. But I loved my neighborhood. I loved knowing that if I walked in the park at 615, I'd see Dan walking clockwise around the pond, and if I walked the opposite direction at 645, I'd see Keith. I loved running into people I knew at the hardware store or the ice cream shop or the subway station. To me (and I think also for Wendell Berry), that's what it means to be rooted in place. And I've never managed to do it in the suburbs.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. How do you share things online in a way that does not presume a level of intimacy that is not appropriate? What’s the line between honesty and vulnerability, and self exploitation?
I do think that everything becomes more complicated once there are things like sponsorships involved. As I’ve processed through how to set up the paid subscriptions on my health/wellness/food Substack, I considered using affiliate links. But for me, anytime I see an affiliate link or sponsorship, it automatically calls into question all the other information that person is presenting. I feel jaded and deceived. So, I think perhaps one way of having integrity is with a much more straightforward subscription model instead of using ad revenue. You ask people to pay for your knowledge and trustworthiness, and in return you (hopefully) don’t exploit them? I get that affiliate links are just how the internet works, and it’s marketing. But I’m so tired of it, and trying to sort through the BS to try to find information.
We lived on a ranch owned by very wealthy individuals in Wyoming for a year. My husband was the caretaker for the property, and I inwardly seethed about every single bit of the beautiful, glistening “farms” that I knew had whole forces of people running them, cost impossible amounts of money…
So I think about this often — will what I write cause another person to stumble? How often can I pull back the curtain and show the help? Show the team that allows this to happen, show what I don’t do because of this? There’s a few homesteaders I have followed that I really respect because they are transparent and their houses are muddy, and they have real life and take good care of their animals and don’t pull silly tricks. And they have boundaries!
Thank you for presenting this dilemma. Why do we choose comfort and relief over valuable words and connection? Why is the tradwife gaining our attention? Is that image of a life on the land providing an escape from our computerized, microwave- dinner lives? I agree that the connected community we crave is out of reach when work and soccer practice grind our lives to a powder. To me. This trad wife business is another stab at motherhood. Another message that what you are serving up to your family is just not as good as those fresh eggs she is carrying to the house. We do not need another unrealistic family image. Please show me the mom who is stirring the spaghetti sauce and has some on her chin as she holds the baby on her hip and the toddler is making a lego tower in the middle of the kitchen. The trad wife image is paper thin. Give me a mom who is kicking the ball around the front yard and the neighbor stops by to update on his sister's surgery. May we put down the images and live fully right where we are.
No amount of fresh air or outdoorsy lifestyle or gathering eggs from your own hens or meals around the family dinner table or staying home instead of working outside the home or fresh-baked cookies or education at home or going camping or attending church together or Bible reading after a home-cooked and hearty breakfast or modest clothes or being choosy about your kids' friends will be a guarantee that your kids will turn out the way you imagined they would. This I know from my experience of trying to do it all right--before tradwives was even a hashtag.
We were created for community, but sacrifice it to the gods of convenience, status, influence, and self-interest. #tradwife is just the latest iteration of style over substance. Until we learn to love our neighbors, the cycle of isolation will continue.
A smallish church we were attending for a while in our new city had a new family come, and long story short, this lady is an IG popular, Christian-wife-and-mother-homesteader with the account. Every encounter with this perfectly human woman was charged with this weird knowledge in the back of my head of why she and her family dressed a certain way, always thinking of her as this visual product and lifestyle to be consumed. I hate everything about what the trend has become, even if there are many admirable things or partial truths to its goodness (as Haley Stewart pointed out in her piece.) It creates flattened ideals and honesty makes it harder to view and love people within the complexities of life. Excellent piece!
Ashley, I think you and Marissa Burt, who is writing here on Substack about much of this content you mentioned would be a great person for you to meet.... https://substack.com/@mburtwrites
I've been mulling over a line from Eugene Peterson in his preface to a sermon collection, where he talks about living in such a way that "...the means by which we live are congruent with the ends for which we live." I want my affections to be formed by the ends for which I live, but formation is so long and slow and I get distracted by the shiny-now-things.
Creating (writing) is a way to battle that distraction, for me. It puts me in time and space. And the "permanence" of a written record is some kind of accountability—I said *this*; am I living it? Maybe that's why I write with so many questions ; ) Less pressure.
I think it's hard in the suburban setting to create a life that is based on rooted affection because rootedness isn't characteristic of suburban living. I lived in the NC suburbs for 20 years and only once ran into someone I knew at a store or shopping mall. People came for jobs, then moved on to better ones elsewhere. Even the physical character of the community was in constant transition: this month's daylily farm was next month's earthmover convention and two months later, a new crop of apartments was beginning to poke up from the red clay soil.
I moved back home to small town Maine eight years back and discovered that the semirural town where my family has a 3rd generation farm was also being turned into a suburban community. Fewer and fewer people lived "in" it; more and more were living transiently "on" it. They left their newly constructed houses in the morning to drive 30 or 60 or 90 minutes to work and returned long after what I'd consider supper time. The downtown is filled with restaurants (although mostly not corporate brands) and the kind of boutique shops where you can pay $300 for a table lamp. The amenities I grew up understanding to be part of what government supports are now fee-based weights on family budgets: singing in the school chorus, performing in the school plays, going to the summer morning recreation programs that used to be a weary mom's summer respite.
I can still find remnants of our small town life here. The guy who lives in the condo a few doors down? His mother grew up down the road from the farm where my mother grew up. Those cool paintings in my kitchen and stairwell? They're by my middle school friend Margaret. Ed. in my square dance club, is the father of a childhood friend of my church's worship pastor. Garden club friend Jeanne's son went to prom with my sister. Almost everyone knew my Uncle Percy and worked his blueberry fields. Almost everyone knows my brother Don ("He's such a great guy!") The guy who fixes my car (from a big garage attached to his house) won't let me walk home while I wait for the repair but drives me ("They're crazy out there in this weather. I don't want you to get hit.") And I quite often run into people I know at the supermarket or downtown.
This is, to me, the stuff of an authentic life built on affection for a place and its people. But it can only happen when people choose to live in their place and to make its people their own.
When I lived in Boston, one of my friends accused me of living in the city as if it was a village. But I loved my neighborhood. I loved knowing that if I walked in the park at 615, I'd see Dan walking clockwise around the pond, and if I walked the opposite direction at 645, I'd see Keith. I loved running into people I knew at the hardware store or the ice cream shop or the subway station. To me (and I think also for Wendell Berry), that's what it means to be rooted in place. And I've never managed to do it in the suburbs.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. How do you share things online in a way that does not presume a level of intimacy that is not appropriate? What’s the line between honesty and vulnerability, and self exploitation?
I do think that everything becomes more complicated once there are things like sponsorships involved. As I’ve processed through how to set up the paid subscriptions on my health/wellness/food Substack, I considered using affiliate links. But for me, anytime I see an affiliate link or sponsorship, it automatically calls into question all the other information that person is presenting. I feel jaded and deceived. So, I think perhaps one way of having integrity is with a much more straightforward subscription model instead of using ad revenue. You ask people to pay for your knowledge and trustworthiness, and in return you (hopefully) don’t exploit them? I get that affiliate links are just how the internet works, and it’s marketing. But I’m so tired of it, and trying to sort through the BS to try to find information.
We lived on a ranch owned by very wealthy individuals in Wyoming for a year. My husband was the caretaker for the property, and I inwardly seethed about every single bit of the beautiful, glistening “farms” that I knew had whole forces of people running them, cost impossible amounts of money…
So I think about this often — will what I write cause another person to stumble? How often can I pull back the curtain and show the help? Show the team that allows this to happen, show what I don’t do because of this? There’s a few homesteaders I have followed that I really respect because they are transparent and their houses are muddy, and they have real life and take good care of their animals and don’t pull silly tricks. And they have boundaries!
Thank you for presenting this dilemma. Why do we choose comfort and relief over valuable words and connection? Why is the tradwife gaining our attention? Is that image of a life on the land providing an escape from our computerized, microwave- dinner lives? I agree that the connected community we crave is out of reach when work and soccer practice grind our lives to a powder. To me. This trad wife business is another stab at motherhood. Another message that what you are serving up to your family is just not as good as those fresh eggs she is carrying to the house. We do not need another unrealistic family image. Please show me the mom who is stirring the spaghetti sauce and has some on her chin as she holds the baby on her hip and the toddler is making a lego tower in the middle of the kitchen. The trad wife image is paper thin. Give me a mom who is kicking the ball around the front yard and the neighbor stops by to update on his sister's surgery. May we put down the images and live fully right where we are.
No amount of fresh air or outdoorsy lifestyle or gathering eggs from your own hens or meals around the family dinner table or staying home instead of working outside the home or fresh-baked cookies or education at home or going camping or attending church together or Bible reading after a home-cooked and hearty breakfast or modest clothes or being choosy about your kids' friends will be a guarantee that your kids will turn out the way you imagined they would. This I know from my experience of trying to do it all right--before tradwives was even a hashtag.
We were created for community, but sacrifice it to the gods of convenience, status, influence, and self-interest. #tradwife is just the latest iteration of style over substance. Until we learn to love our neighbors, the cycle of isolation will continue.
A smallish church we were attending for a while in our new city had a new family come, and long story short, this lady is an IG popular, Christian-wife-and-mother-homesteader with the account. Every encounter with this perfectly human woman was charged with this weird knowledge in the back of my head of why she and her family dressed a certain way, always thinking of her as this visual product and lifestyle to be consumed. I hate everything about what the trend has become, even if there are many admirable things or partial truths to its goodness (as Haley Stewart pointed out in her piece.) It creates flattened ideals and honesty makes it harder to view and love people within the complexities of life. Excellent piece!
Ashley, I think you and Marissa Burt, who is writing here on Substack about much of this content you mentioned would be a great person for you to meet.... https://substack.com/@mburtwrites
You are both so wise.
I've been mulling over a line from Eugene Peterson in his preface to a sermon collection, where he talks about living in such a way that "...the means by which we live are congruent with the ends for which we live." I want my affections to be formed by the ends for which I live, but formation is so long and slow and I get distracted by the shiny-now-things.
Creating (writing) is a way to battle that distraction, for me. It puts me in time and space. And the "permanence" of a written record is some kind of accountability—I said *this*; am I living it? Maybe that's why I write with so many questions ; ) Less pressure.