A part of me didn’t want to read the Ballerina Farm article, because on some level I’m tired of listening to ideologues. I’m tired of traditionalists and I’m tired of feminists that think of her and every other woman that exists on the Internet as ammunition for their agendas. I’m tired of people ignoring what’s right in front of them, fabricating what isn’t, and incapable of holding a conversation without projecting their obsessive, borderline militant beliefs about gender and relationships.
But even though a part of me just wanted to wait for it to blow over because I wasn’t interested in emotional lectures from hardcore conservatives or preachy progressives, a part of me felt compelled to read the article for myself and offer a perspective removed from the grandstanding and hysterics I’d already seen.
There are people that want to believe that Ballerina Farm is miserable. They want to believe that behind the idyllic pictures and the videos full of love and laughter is a broken woman, trapped in a life she never actually wanted, married to patriarchy personified, who dreams daily about abandoning her family and escaping to New York.
And there are people that want to believe that “returning to tradition” is just frolicking through wheatfields and baking pastries instead of grueling manual labor. They want to believe that being married, having 8 kids, and living off the land means you’re deliriously happy, and fulfilled, and that you never long for anything else. They want to believe that because it’s the lifestyle they herald and aspire to, that it’s an easier lifestyle than it actually is.
But the truth is most women (and people) are more complex than terminally online Twitter warriors give them credit for – and I think that includes Ballerina Farm.
Obviously, I don’t know this woman. I’ve never even followed her. My assessment is based purely on the article I read and the very limited background knowledge I’ve accumulated. But I’m not vibrationally retarded, and that’s more than most people can say, so I probably have a better read on the situation than anyone else you’ve seen chime in so far.
I saw that some new things have come out since the article I read over the weekend, but I want to note that I didn’t read/listen to them, because I didn’t feel like it. I’m sorry I just don’t care that much; I’m not turning this into a thesis.
I don’t think Ballerina Farm is crying herself to sleep at night. I think if presented with a choice to go back in time and continue her ballet career versus the life she has now, she’d choose the life she has now with very little hesitation, if any at all. But her life isn’t a meme or a Pinterest board…it’s a life, and it’s definitely not the fairytale that tradtards want to pretend it is.
A lot of their life seems to revolve around what her husband wanted. They were engaged a month after dating despite her protests, because it’s what he wanted. They started farming because it’s what he wanted. They don’t have nannies because he doesn’t want them, and she was unmedicated for most of her births because it’s what he wanted.
I also think it’s a mistake to ignore the environment she grew up in. She was raised in a large Mormon family, in a religion that puts a huge emphasis and pressure on women marrying young and having as many kids as possible. I wouldn’t be surprised if she made certain choices because it’s what a good Mormon woman would do as opposed to what she actually wanted to do.
Does that mean he’s abusive? Does that mean she doesn’t love him, or that he doesn’t love her? Does that mean she longs for a life she never had, or resents the one she does have? I don’t think so. At all.
I don’t even think it’s necessarily wrong that her life ended up shaped by what her husband wanted. Men are called to the head of their households for a reason.
It’s easy to focus on dreams deferred, and try to turn this woman into a victim.
But I think that love can lead us to beautiful places we never dreamed of going, and that God’s plans for our lives will always be more impressive than our plans for our lives.
So many of us go to college and spend years of our lives building our careers only to realize a decade later that what we thought we wanted at 18 isn’t actually what we want at 25, 30 or 35. So I don’t think it’s fair or reasonable to speculate that she hates her life because it looks different in her 30s than she thought it would in her late adolescence/early adulthood.
But I also don’t know if her mostly happy ending means the less glamorous or flattering aspects of her life or how she got there should be glossed over or brushed under the rug.
In the original article, her husband said that there were whole weeks she wouldn’t leave bed because she was so exhausted. And I do think it’s a little insane and absurd that married to a billionaire and living on hundreds of acres, she didn’t have a ballet studio, where she could do one thing for herself. With all those kids and trees I feel like they could’ve built it themselves. Like, it’s literally called Ballerina Farm. Please be serious.
So many women feel like they lose their identities to marriage and motherhood. At some point, they stop feeling like individuals with thoughts, feelings, interests and opinions of their own, living purely as extensions of their husbands and children. And it makes a lot of them insane.
Sacrifice is a beautiful thing, and I think Hannah Neeleman would agree. But beautiful things can be made ugly. And when people treat women like they *only* exist to sacrifice and serve, that’s exactly what they do.
what do you think?