I am fairly certain that if you have spent any meaningful amount of time on social media this week, you have heard about the latest Nara Smith controversy. Essentially, Nara went on another popular podcast and once again asked some version of the question, I’m a working mother, so why are you calling me a tradwife? The internet, in its usual calm and measured fashion, collectively responded, Girl, because you used the hashtag. Fair enough.

I do want to point out, however, that this is not actually the first time Nara Smith has rejected the tradwife label. She has been saying for years that the internet’s characterization of her life doesn’t completely match the life she is actually living. Of course, the timing has made people suspicious. There is a cookbook coming, major brand partnerships, and an increasingly mainstream career to consider, so plenty of people have suggested that we are watching a very intentional brand shift, a strategic pivot away from a label that may have helped build an audience but could become limiting when there are millions of dollars sitting on the other side of it. That is certainly possible. Or, and stay with me here, the woman has four children, a career, a husband, a cookbook, modeling work and an enormous media platform, and perhaps she simply no longer has the time to make homemade Oreos on a Tuesday. Sometimes the boring explanation deserves a seat at the table too.

But let’s zoom out for a minute, because this entire controversy reminded me of something that happened to me years ago. At the beginning of fourth grade, my family moved from Fresno, California, and yes, FRESNO, to Nashville, Tennessee. My father was beginning his medical residency at Meharry Medical College, and suddenly our family’s entire social world changed. The church we joined happened to be near Vanderbilt’s campus, and several physicians and medical professionals attended there. They embraced our family, welcomed us into their circles, and I found myself observing a world that looked completely different from the one I had known in California.

You have to understand what this looked like through my nine-year-old eyes. We had essentially jumped two social classes overnight, and I was fascinated. One minute I was a little poor Fresno girl accustomed to secondhand clothes from church members and afternoons at thrift stores, and the next minute everybody’s daddy was a physician. Somebody was a department chair. Somebody else was a chief medical officer. I didn’t understand hospital administration, academic medicine or physician compensation, but I understood enough to translate all of this into the only language necessary for a nine-year-old: these people were rich.

And the wives fascinated me even more. Our new friends’ mothers were shopping at Dillard’s and Belk for their church clothes, while I can still remember staring at the beautiful church dresses with glitter and velvet skirts and matching shoes. If you have read Silk & Cedar for any amount of time, you already know that I have always been fascinated by women, how they live, how they create homes, how they raise children, how they carry themselves and how they build a life. These particular women seemed to have cracked the code. They were doctor’s wives. Many stayed home with their children, volunteered at church, dressed beautifully and seemed completely devoted to their families. And, naturally, they all drove Suburbans. Apparently the Chevrolet Suburban was the official vehicle of upper-middle-class Southern motherhood in the 1990s.

I idolized these women, which was slightly problematic considering I was sitting in church fully aware that 1 John 5:21 says, “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.” Unfortunately, I was nine and they had beautiful handbags, so the Lord was simply going to have to continue working with me. I remember sitting in church watching these women more closely than I listened to the pastor. I wanted to attend the events they organized, I studied how they dressed, and I paid attention to their marriages, their children and their homes. Somewhere along the way, without anyone actually telling me this was what womanhood was supposed to look like, I decided this was exactly what womanhood was supposed to look like.

Eventually, my family became particularly close with one family that would profoundly shape how I imagined my own future. I won’t mention them by name because they deserve their privacy, but they were extraordinarily kind to us and they were also, for lack of a more sophisticated economic description, loaded. They lived in the Hillwood area of Nashville in the kind of enormous house that made a child wonder whether perhaps another family lived somewhere in the back and we simply hadn’t met them yet. I remember walking around their home with my mouth open because I genuinely could not understand how one family required that much square footage. There was also a huge boat in the garage, and at nine years old that was really all the financial analysis I needed. If you had a house I could get lost in and a boat in the garage, I didn’t need to see a tax return. You were rich.

More than the house, though, I became fascinated with the mother. She had been a nurse, she had married a successful physician, she stayed home with their children, and from where I was standing she had this beautiful home, beautiful family and beautiful life. For the next several years, she quietly became one of the templates I used to imagine adulthood. I had found the blueprint, and the plan seemed rather straightforward: become a nurse, marry well, have children, stay home with them, buy a Suburban and apparently acquire a boat somewhere along the way.

Eventually our families moved and drifted apart, but completely randomly, during my sophomore year of college, we reconnected. I was preparing to apply to nursing school, and she offered to take me to dinner so we could catch up. She picked me up in, naturally, a Suburban, because at least one part of this story needed consistency. Somewhere on the drive, I told her how much I had looked up to her when I was younger. I told her I was going to become a nurse like she had been, and then I proudly explained that my plan was to eventually stay home and raise my children just like she had.

Bless. My. Heart.

This woman did not hesitate. She essentially looked at me and said, Girl, you don’t know the half of it, and then proceeded to tell me the half of it, the other half, and perhaps a small appendix I had not requested. She told me about the sacrifice. She told me about the loss of identity and the isolation that could come with staying home. She told me about petty social circles, expectations, and the pressures of raising children surrounded by extraordinary privilege. She talked about the compromises she had made and the parts of herself she had sometimes struggled to hold onto. She did not tell me that she regretted her family, that she didn’t love her husband or children, or that staying home had been some terrible mistake. What she told me was much more complicated than that. She told me that the life I had been watching all those years was real, but it wasn’t the whole story.

I remember sitting there absolutely shook because this was the woman I was practically going to college to copy, and she was explaining to me that the beautiful life I had spent years studying came with costs I had never even considered. The interesting part, looking back, is that she had never lied to me. She had never pulled nine-year-old me aside at church and said, Kalie, this is the secret to a perfect life. She had simply lived her life. I had watched her from the outside and written the rest of the story myself.

That is exactly what I keep thinking about while watching everyone argue about Nara Smith.

What if part of the reason people are so angry is because Nara is telling us that the story we constructed around her videos is not necessarily the story she thought she was telling? She showed us beautiful clothes, elaborate meals, babies, marriage and domesticity, and somewhere along the way millions of women watched this breathtaking woman make cereal from scratch and collectively decided feminism might have been a clerical error. Now she is saying, Actually, I’m a working mother, and people feel deceived because that isn’t the story they thought they were watching.

But I don’t think millions of women suddenly developed a deep desire to return to 1954. I think millions of women are simply tired, and that distinction matters. Women were told we could have careers, which was wonderful, but somewhere along the way having choices turned into being responsible for absolutely everything. Have the career, raise the children, schedule the pediatrician, remember Spirit Week, make dinner, exercise, maintain friendships, have sex with your husband, volunteer at school, drink enough water, keep the house presentable, answer the emails, respond to 47 school-app notifications and remember that tomorrow is Crazy Sock Day. Then, after you have successfully completed all of that, please make sure you are prioritizing self-care because apparently exhaustion is also something we are personally responsible for managing.

When that is the reality of modern womanhood, it isn’t particularly difficult to understand why watching a beautiful woman quietly make mozzarella from scratch in a silk dress starts looking less like TikTok and more like a religious experience. I don’t think we are necessarily looking at her thinking, I would like fewer rights. I think we are looking at her thinking, My God, that woman appears to have time.

And perhaps time is what she was really selling us, whether she intended to or not.

That is why the collective outrage this week took me right back to sitting at Fido on 21st Avenue South in Nashville all those years ago, listening to a woman I had idolized explain the parts of her beautiful life that I had never been able to see. I had spent years assuming that because I could see the house, the marriage, the children, the clothes and the Suburban, I understood the life. I didn’t. I had confused observation with understanding, and social media has essentially industrialized that mistake.

You can totally stop there but I have one more point to make…

The irony in Nara’s case is that the woman so many people associated with economic dependence appears to be anything but economically dependent. She is working, and quite successfully. She is a model, content creator, entrepreneur and cookbook author with an enormous commercial platform. Her husband works too, of course, but the image of Nara quietly existing in a kitchen while her husband goes out into the world to provide for the family was always a rather strange assumption to make about a woman filming content that millions of people were watching.

That is the great paradox of the tradwife influencer economy. The successful woman showing you a life that appears removed from traditional employment is often running a very sophisticated media business from her kitchen. There are cameras, contracts, brand partnerships, affiliate revenue, management teams, editing, cookbooks, advertising agreements, analytics and social platforms involved. Somewhere, somebody is probably emailing about deliverables while the butter is being churned. The domesticity may be authentic, but it is also content, and sometimes the apron is the product.

This is also why I hesitate to say that Nara Smith “sold” women economic dependence. Did she actually sell us that, or did she show us beautiful domesticity and we supplied the ideology ourselves? I think that question is considerably more uncomfortable because it requires us to acknowledge our own participation. Social media gives us fragments of people’s lives and our brains turn those fragments into biographies. We see the kitchen but not the business meeting. We see the dress but not the contract. We see the homemade cereal but not whoever cleans the kitchen afterward. We see the Suburban but we don’t hear the conversation happening inside it.

I learned that lesson twenty-something years ago from a woman I adored. A beautiful life can actually be beautiful and still be complicated. A woman can deeply love her husband and still acknowledge what she sacrificed for her marriage. She can adore her children and miss parts of herself. She can enjoy homemaking and still want intellectual work. She can make dinner from scratch and still have a career. She can be grateful and exhausted at exactly the same time. Most importantly, a woman can willingly choose a life and still be honest about what that choice cost her.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that Nara Smith changed her story. Perhaps the problem is that somewhere between the homemade cereal, the couture dresses and the beautifully whispered voiceovers, we forgot that we were only watching a few minutes of it.

I certainly forgot once.

She drove a Suburban.

Always Have, Always Will ~ Kalie