The “Queen of Trad Wives” has finally responded to the viral interview about her lifestyle. Yes, I’m talking about Hannah Neeleman, the influencer behind Ballerina Farm, who often shares photos of her picture-perfect life raising eight kids on a farm with her husband Daniel Neeleman. If you missed it, less than two weeks ago The Times dropped a bombshell profile on Hannah Neeleman. The reporter Megan Agnew has since written about the experience of the story going viral, writing “In the week since we published the interview, we have had an enormous and impassioned response, a whirl of arguments and opinions whipping up speed on social media.” While she claims it wasn’t her intent to paint Hannah in any certain light, both Hannah and Daniel didn’t seem happy about what was written about them.
In a video posted on her Instagram, captioned simply “What I’ve been thinking lately…,” Hannah walks us through a day-in-the-life video with a scripted voiceover.
“A couple of weeks ago we had a reporter come over to our home to learn more about our family and business,” she starts off, adding that she thought it went well. “We were taken back, however, when we saw the printed article which shocked us and shocked the world by being an attack on our family and my marriage. Portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit.”
She went on to say that this was misleading and that “nothing in the interview implied this conclusion.” Going so far as to say she believed an angle was predetermined before they even met. And that getting married was actually the greatest day of her life. “Together we’ve built a business from scratch, we brought eight children into this world, and prioritized our marriage all along the way.”
While this video has already sparked unhinged comments, I’m sure there will be plenty of think pieces and Twitter debates in the days to come. And I know these words will continue to echo in my childless ears: “We aren’t done having babies.”
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The reporter of the initial profile shared that she received a lot of criticism for writing the piece as a childless, unmarried woman who didn’t relate to Hannah’s life at home with eight kids. “But I felt the exact opposite when I was there,” Agnew writes for The Times in a follow-up story. “It made me understand exactly how it was to be a woman with eight children and no childcare: demanding and rewarding and gloriously intimate and difficult to find a space to speak.”
As far as being oppressed? Hannah ends her video reply with, “For now I’m doing what I love most: being a mother, wife, a businesswoman, a farmer.” For her sake, I hope she’s telling the truth.
