We're tired: we want to be 'tradwives' for a while

PalmNow it turns out I like to do batch cooking. We are the person I would have tried to avoid being if, five or ten years ago, someone had told me that I would end up doing this on a Sunday: preparing a two-liter pot of vegetable cream to put in Tupperware for the whole week. The worst part—and what makes me even more the person I would have hated to be—is that it's therapeutic. For the two hours my ritual lasts, I'm only focused on this. It's not exactly an achievement, even though I've discovered a new way to meditate. It's just that having three different food preparations going forces you to be quite focused. It terrifies me to think that I've found satisfaction in this hyper-productivity: having half the week's meals sorted in the middle of the afternoon. What a shame.

The prelude to all this was learning to make granola. Spending a little time—20 minutes, at most—preparing, mixing, and baking the oats, nuts, and seeds with honey gave me a taste of that feeling that I've now managed to amplify. I don't know what it is, but I find a pleasurable effect in the whole preparation process, in feeling that, for the time it takes for the food to cook, I'll only be doing this. That's when I let the little one out. tradwife that lives inside me, finding a use for all the kitchen utensils that are, in reality, completely unnecessary: kettle, mandoline, steamer… At times, the experience is almost cathartic, because I manage to forget all the other things I should be doing. Procrastinating by cooking makes me feel less guilty. It's not that I forget everything I have to do, it's just that at least I'm putting it aside for something I won't regret. And this calms my intrusive thoughts a little.

With my friends we joke around, but with that knowing, knowing tone, glancing at each other sideways, playing with just enough sarcasm to guess if what we're saying would really be crazy without the veneer of humor: "I wish I were tradwife For a while now, we're stuck at home, and in a moment of madness, the only way we've found to cope is by becoming housewives. As if there were no middle ground. tradwivesSometimes, I even fantasize about motherhood. Not about having children, but about the act of mothering. In moments of weakness, far from seeing it as a monumental task, it presents itself to me as a respite. A respite from economic productivity, from the pressure to progress, from new challenges. And it becomes the only justifiable excuse to stop everything and retreat, to create an ecosystem compatible with life, to return to basic needs: eating, sleeping, getting by, and little else.

While I'm writing and rewriting this text, I go on Substack to clear my head, and instinctively I look for my tranquilizer on the internet, which is the blog. That thing you do, by Noe Olbés, where she chats with female creators—writers, photographers, journalists, designers—about their routines. The latest entry, 'Photographing Intimacy', begins by quoting a scene from the book The Party (1984 Editions), by Tessa Hadley, which brings me exactly to the feeling I'm trying to describe, and which has me confused: "At home, the steam from Rose's cooking condensed on the windows. (...) All that chaos of domestic life sometimes felt suffocating and intolerable. That afternoon, however, they laughed nonstop and displayed exuberant energy, even though dinner weighed like lead in their stomachs."

I think about these women Hadley describes and suddenly come to the conclusion that we should become our own tradwivesWe should guarantee ourselves the level of care that is only assumed for others. And, for the first time, it seems like a good idea that, apart from having a room of our own—a house of our own, in the best-case scenario—it would also be good to have time of our own to retreat to, to unwind, so we don't have to sacrifice any other aspect of life in favor of our domestic chaos.