TikTok Creator Enitza Templeton Recalls the Ugly Behind the Scenes of Being a Trad Wife

TikTok creator Enitza Templeton is looking back at her time as what would now be considered a trad wife.

"It's just this little dangling carrot to keep you trying to be this perfect trophy wife. She's beautiful, she has the children, she does it unmedicated," Templeton, 41, said in an interview with People published on Tuesday. July 30. "It's this stupid, stupid, stupid goalpost that's always moving. You can never reach it because if you bake the bread, well, did you use fresh yeast? Oh. Well, did you mill the flour? Oh. Well, did you grow the wheat that you milled the flour? They can keep pushing it back."

A trad wife, which is short for traditional wife, is a woman who rejects modern gender roles and is in favor of an old-fashioned definition of womanhood. The idea has become a hot topic online especially after Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman was the focus of a controversial newspaper feature. In the Sunday Times article, Neeleman denied identifying as a trad wife despite documenting her life as a mom of eight, working on their farm in Utah and making meals from scratch on social media.

"I see their deep, deep, deep desire to validate the lifestyle and to be like, 'Look at me. I'm so perfect and beautiful, and I do all these things amazingly,'" Templeton explained of seeing the parallels between her life and Neeleman’s via her social media content. "It's super sad. It's also a little bit disingenuous. I know what it's like. You're not showing the full picture. There is a lot of ugliness behind the scenes."

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Templeton, who grew up in a religious home and community, got married in 2009 as a 26-year-old college graduate. Initially, Templeton and her husband — whose identity she has not revealed — had a dual-income household. However, once Templeton got pregnant with their first child and laid off by her HR job, the pair agreed to pivot toward traditional gender roles.

"We would say — and this is super common in the little Christian circles — we're living on loans and love right now until we can make it," she explained to the outlet.

Templeton went on to welcome four children and became the family’s primary caregiver. In addition to feeding her husband and children, Templeton also maintained their home and home-schooled her little ones.

"That's it. Just cooking meals, taking care of kids and tending to everybody else's needs,” she reflected. “That was the whole day."

Templeton’s routine began to grow more difficult after her second child was born with Down syndrome and a heart defect. While facing the challenges of caring for a child with medical needs, Templeton found herself pregnant again shortly after.

"I was having a baby that was having open heart surgery, but I was still pregnant with another one. And then pregnant with another one, and another open heart surgery," Templeton recalled. "And then trying to homeschool one of them and trying to keep this one alive with her oxygen and then pregnant with the next one."

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Templeton shared that she had to constantly weigh her baby to make sure the infant was an optimal size to undergo surgery.

"While I'm still pregnant with another one, I'm weighing this one, making sure she's okay, homeschooling the oldest one, making sure I'm cooking every meal from scratch and as organic as possible," she said. "I shouldn't have been 39 weeks pregnant, open heart surgery and then next week birthing another one, and then two years later, birthing another one while there's still another surgery because she's still struggling. That's so not sustainable. It's not appropriate."

Templeton didn’t see any concerns at the time about her lifestyle. However, after getting to know mothers with a more modern lifestyle at one of her daughter’s Girls Scout events, she began to look at things differently.

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"It was the first time I was hanging out with women that were a little bit above my socioeconomic class, women who did have businesses and who were told, 'You can do anything. You don't have to be a wife,'" she recalled. "They knew I had four kids and the baby was just now old enough to be home. I was like, 'Oh, I think we're going to start talking about having our next baby.' And they were like, 'No, no,' They spoke to me so bluntly and honestly.”

After the conversation, Templeton sought out work so she could “help” the family and thought the job would help her mental health. After finding some independence, Templeton ultimately decided to end her marriage after she and her husband had an explosive fight.

"If I want my daughters to do any different, I'm going to have to show them different," she explained of her decision to start fresh. "From that moment on, I started to make more and more changes in my life until I finally left."