My Fad Life: A Trad Wife Alternative

By now we’re all very across the theory surrounding the ‘rise of the Tradwives’ for heteronormative women, especially those heading into their mid-thirties. Burnt out and slipping behind the salary of their male peers, they are submitting to the age-old patriarchal system that is staying home to make paleo Cheerios.

Instead of slogging it out in meeting rooms or enduring back-to-back Teams calls, they can stay at home and make martinis, babies and buckwheat belinis… or whatever it is you make out of buckwheat?

Although they seem to be unpicking apart the threads woven by decades of feminist suffrage, I actually don’t judge them. I've come to realise that I am trying to do the exact same thing — just without the Cheerios.

Here I am at thirty-something claiming to be on a “sabbatical” — a word I have been using in place of freelancing — after another hectic contract has burnt me out. And like the tradwives, I'm also searching for alternatives to going back to office life.

However, as an unmarried, child-free woman whose feminism at times borders on misandry, I’m certainly not about to don an apron and start ironing anyone’s underwear. Instead, I have been trying every creative whim that crosses my mind, with the hope that I become one of those women you read about in airline magazines, the ones who have time for morning baths.

In the last six months, I have tried:

• Designing t-shirts on red bubble

• Starting a wine reviews website 

• Learning to upholster furniture from Gumtree

• Vintage clothing hauls on Depop

• Taking stock photography

• Propagating plants

• Becoming a social media influencer (but really who hasn’t after a few wines?!)

My attempts of stock photography, upholstery and influencing

Needless to say, nothing has quite taken off. We also have a lot of very mis-matched upholstered furniture and tiny bits of plants in jars in our apartment.

Perhaps I am just having my own little trad wife meltdown moment? Or maybe without a full time job I just have the time to expel all that pent-up creative energy?

For now, I am calling this the ‘fad life’ movement. For those who are over the office onslaught, but not willing to totally turn their backs on the suffrage that paved the way for working women.

At some point though, I’m going to have to find fad lucrative enough to pay the mortgage or pick up my laptop and go back to the office. Unlike some, I don’t have a rich husband to make martinis for and foot the bill.