Last week, the Times of London published a revealing profile of Hannah Neeleman, the influencer more commonly known by her handle and the business she runs with her husband, Ballerina Farm. Neeleman, a Mormon mother of eight who studied ballet at Juilliard before devoting her life to home-making, beauty pageanting, and — in the past few years — cooking from scratch on Instagram, has been the subject of extensive discourse. She and her husband, Daniel, the son of JetBlue’s CEO, have eight children, and they live on a gorgeous farm in Utah, where they can often be found baking bread and milking their many cows on Ballerina Farm’s Instagram.
Referring to Neeleman as “the Queen of the tradwives,” the Times’ Megan Agnew painted an unsettling portrait of Neeleman’s life. For one thing, the reporter had difficulty even speaking with Neeleman without her husband talking over her. Neeleman also described ending her ballet career with the words, “You give up a piece of yourself,” suggesting it was not a choice she made happily. The piece also included a lot of information not covered on her sunny feed, like the fact that she sometimes gets so sick from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week, or the intensity of the couple’s Mormonism, which includes not using birth control. (Neeleman claims that she asks God, “Is it time to bring another one to the Earth?” and has “never been told no.”) Perhaps most sinister is a moment where Neeleman reveals she delivered almost all of her eight children without pain medication and seems to not want her husband to know that she did use an epidural for one of them — on a day he happened not to be in the delivery room.
For many readers, the takeaway was that Neeleman gave up a career she was passionate about for an isolated, oppressed life with a controlling husband. Naturally, these revelations have kicked the already fervent discourse around Neeleman — and tradwife content in general — into even higher gear. (They also put the fact that she participated in a beauty pageant 12 days after giving birth to her youngest child in even darker context.) Her comments are now flooded with people criticizing Daniel and telling her, “Girl run.”
But out in the rolling fields of rural Utah, Neeleman and her husband — who posts under the handle @hogfathering — are doubling down on their lifestyle. In a new video posted Wednesday, Neeleman spoke about the ways in which she felt her marriage and family had been misrepresented in the article, set over over clips of her brushing her teeth, deadlifting in the gym, and driving a tractor while holding her baby. “We thought the interview went really well,” she said. “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.”
“This couldn’t be further from the truth. Nothing we said in the interview implied this conclusion, which leads me to believe the angle taken was predetermined,” she continued, before confirming the couple is not “done having babies.” “For Daniel and I, our priority in life is God and family. Everything else comes second. The greatest day in my life was when Daniel and I were married thirteen years ago … We are one. And I love him more today than I did thirteen years ago.”
In a separate video posted Sunday, the couple again ignored the tradlife discourse to promote Ballerina Farm’s dairy products. “When we started to farm, I was swept up in the beauty of learning to make food from scratch,” Neeleman said over the sounds of mooing cows, while footage of her and her cowboy-booted husband kissing in a cattle field, a small child in her arms, played. She shared that they recently “snuck over” to their newly constructed dairy for a date night, presumably to sample the butter, cheese, ice cream, and yogurt that would soon be available at the Ballerina Farm store. “It’s the world we created, and I couldn’t love it more.”
Sounds like these two are determined to milk their way through it all.