Ballerina farm - just fell down a rabbit hole

A billionaire who, in her own words, pressured her into having children before she wanted them as she knew it would signal the end of her ballet career.

“My goal was New York City. I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get there, I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina,” she said. Neeleman had been training as a ballerina at Juilliard school in New York City when she met Daniel. “But I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different.” “I gave up dance, which was hard. You give up a piece of yourself."

The writer, Megan Agnew, then notes: “I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree. Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.”

From https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/hannah-neeeleman-ballerina-farm

and:

“I saw her and I was ready to go,” he said. “Sign me up. I was thinking, ‘Let’s get married.’ But she wouldn’t go on a date with me for six months.”
Instead their first date took place on a flight that Hannah was taking from Salt Lake City to New York, after Daniel "made a call" so they would be seated together on her flight. Daniel's father, David Neeleman, is the founder and CEO of JetBlue. From there, Hannah admitted that Daniel pushed for them to move quickly in their relationship, and three months later they were married.

“Back then I thought we should date for a year [before marriage],” Hannah told The Times. “So I could finish school and whatever. And Daniel was, like, ‘It’s not going to work, we’ve got to get married now.’”

From: https://www.distractify.com/p/ballerina-farm-husband

It's a sacrifice with a pretty massive compensation.

She is immensely privileged to have a choice of continuing as a ballerina (which her religious parents helped facilitate, ironically the same upbringing which she is embracing and receiving criticism for) OR marrying an heir to a Airline Magnate, starting a successful business, owning prime acreage in America, and never having to step outside her already paid of self-renovated house to work for strangers.

Oh the sorrow and tears!

I'll shed tears for Hannah the next time my gas bill arrives and I question how I'm going to afford it and whether I can afford to keep renting in the area I live in due to rent increases.

I have been a black single mother facing the dilemma of throwing my badly emotionally attached child in nursery too early. Many mothers of all backgrounds face the same dilemma with a hell of a lot less.

Hannah's rich. Hannah is white. Hannah is blonde. Hannah is beautiful. Hannah has a huge supportive Mormon community and family. Hannah is a land owner. Hannah is popular. Hannah is fecund. Hannah would not end up poor in a divorce. Hannah has it made...STILL Despite not going to Julliard.

Give me those choices.

You seem to want to present her as victim. Why?

I think @sunsetsandboardwalks is quoting from this article, @LondonFox

https://www.thetimes.com/article/34a971ae-4e4c-422c-8566-58b5f14dc81e?shareToken=9de46560b581e65b3b6128836ff41029. 

She gave it up to marry a billionaire. Some people would also see that as a massive opportunity.

It wouldn’t be the life I’d pick, but ballerinas are not paid well and do not have secure careers, and she may well have decided she was better off marrying money and putting up with playing at being a milkmaid for a bit. I doubt either of them will be doing this in ten years’ time.

At the bottom of this article:

https://www.wellandgood.com/epidural-backlash-tradwife-ballerina-farm/

"Neeleman herself got a taste of a less social media-ready way of laboring. She delivered two of her eight children in the hospital. For her third-youngest's birth, Martha, Neeleman's husband—whom the Sunday Times profile paints as domineering—was not present because of work. Martha was expected to be a large baby. So Neeleman had an epidural. “It was an amazing experience,” Neeleman tells the Sunday Times, in a whisper. “It was kinda great.”

She loved it. But why wasn't she allowed it again, I wonder?

It doesn’t say that her husband decides when the next pregnancy will be. The opposite - she says she prays about it and asks God’s guidance.

Yes, my mistake - it's his comment about "it's a matter of prayer but somehow it's exactly nine months" that's telling to me.

Are we reading the same thing?
The one linked on a forst page New York Times says nothing about childbirth.
Can you post a li k to a piece you are quoting?

I had never heard of this woman until this thread, but am I missing something? I read the interview - why do people think she’s being abused?

They are not struggling hand to mouth. They are billionaires - is that right? But they’ve chosen to have 8 kids and live out there on a farm and make Tik Tok videos / recipes, farm stuff etc. They can afford to.

She says she doesn’t identify with the trad wife movement. He jokes that he’s ‘trad dad.’ Why are people worried for her, she knows what she’s doing. I mean, I don’t work since I had kids and now have 4 teens. I also was training in ballet before I met my husband. Would people have felt sorry for me if I’d made a video about making a rhubarb crumble or whatever when the kids were little and running about everywhere? (Not that I would have and we certainly don’t live on a farm).

It’s just Instagram. They present a curated image. Of course they will have help behind the scenes. She is not stupid. Nobody forced her to live there or marry him or have
8 kids. She’s from a large family herself, so that’s normal to her. The pageant thing is a bit weird, but that’s American culture and it’s not necessarily weird to them. She doesn’t have to be straining butter and all that malarkey - she’s just like other would be ‘influencers’ - she does it for the Insta!

They’re certainly not poor - I agree. I think she came from a comfortably off family and her husband comes from a very wealthy family. The article I posted on the previous page mentions her husband comes from a wealthy family.

@LateAF You're not wrong about that. Poor Sonya, imagine calling someone for help like that. America is fucked. :-/

I didn’t read it like that. She normally has home births, so her husband is around to support and she obviously can’t have an epidural. Plenty of women choose to give birth at home and don’t want epidurals! It’s not that unusual or any indicator of abuse,

She had to go into hospital with this one child because she was 2 weeks overdue. Her husband was at home with the kids so she was alone without his support. Presumably she was induced, she wouldn’t have been allowed to use a birthing pool due to being high risk, and given all those factors it was a much more painful, complicated and difficult labour - why she chose the epidural.

It doesn’t say that her husband decides when the next pregnancy will be. The opposite - she says she prays about it and asks God’s guidance.

@theworldsmad You're right of course, dreams do change. I didn't get that sense in the article though. I got the sense she regretted that aspect of her life. I certainly wouldn't have any objection to someone living their lives this way if I felt there was a clear choice in it.

But the fact she came from this sort of (IMO abusive) background and has just sort of plunged back into it within her marriage - I don't think she had the requisite tools to recognise in the first instance that she was being love bombed.

Anyway, I don't know her at all. But I have been in toxic relationships, and the article resonated with me on some level.

@tsmainsqueeze she says herself she was pushed into marriage and babies before she was ready - it's right there in the article she gave up her dreams at Juillard because he wanted babies.

So...
I just fell down the Ballerina Farm rabbit hole too

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13677011/amp/ballerina-farm-times-article-viral-hannah-neeleman-jetblue-heir-husband.html

This is the sort of lifestyle JD Vance dreams of in a woman. Fertile yet emaciated , overworked and probably heading for an early end.

I doubt she was going to ever be a premier glitterati ballerina.

But she made it to Juillard and gave it up for him. That's a huge sacrifice, no matter how "successful" she appears to be now.

You don't know her, you 'know' an instagram version of her ,you don't know that she was forced into marriage or forced to give up her dream ,she seems pretty shrewd with her 'business',she could have secretly taken contraception,she has a free will,she didn't have to marry so soon.
I agree with most who are negative about the perception of her ideas and the way of life we see ,no way would i want what she seems to have for myself or my daughter but the article is just another example of one person - the journalists perception of her lifestyle.
Only the two of them know what is happening in their marriage , everything else is just media speculation, i hope she is not being abused ,i still think not but i have no time for Mormon beliefs whatsoever regardless.

@theworldsmad of course life often turns out differently from how we imagine it.

But we're not talking about some far-fetched teenage fantasy - she made it. She got accepted into the best dance school in the world - this isn't just someone with a dream, she actually did get a place at Juillard. She also says herself she didn't want to marry or have children so soon into their relationship but he wanted it, so it happened.

She was also supposed to have a purpose-built ballet studio on their property but it got taken over to be a homeschool space for her kids.

This isn't someone like Penny from Big Bang Theory who kind of dreamt of being an actress but ended up successful in another field. This is someone who really did have it all and gave it all up for a man - and not entirely willingly. She says so herself.

'What makes me think that' is that I have been following her account as a genuine follower (not so much this year as she hasn't put any recipes out for a while and I think I know why) for years, not someone purveying her account for a couple hours with a set of already established biases about religious women, women who choose to have big families and women who represent a SAHM lifestyle vs a Career.

I have actually DM'd her on several occasions and she has been really nice. Other times she's too busy to reply. In her livestreams she often does the majority of the talking and there's been times I've thought 'Let the man speak!'

She leaves her husband with the kids every year for weeks to do pageants. The article omitted to mention that she gets outside help to do to the work, videos and homeschooling.

Reading the Times Article I get some of the concern, but I don't for a moment believe the journalist wasn't already keen to highlight the parts that appeared to fit the narrative of 'Coerced Tradwife'

Plenty of women give up careers to have children and/or support the family business. I don't see why it's a such big concern when the potential compensation (land, wealthy man, business, raising children full time) in this case is so huge. That's also a huge thing too you know. I doubt she was going to ever be a premier glitterati ballerina. I read something about it ironically in a different negative article

Don't dreams changed overtime?
Are you're dreams still the same ones you had at 16.
I've always had this dream of playing in a movie, maybe living in Paris and a few other.
Even if I still would theoretically like to do those things, I also wanted a family. And that dream is more important now.
Now I dream of one day being able to afford all organic food for my babies- or better yet- produce it myself.
I dream of a home with a realllllly large kitchen and an aga. I dream of cooking spectacular meals and inviting people over. And never having to buy margarine but always able to slather everything in butter!
I dream of wearing beautiful, expensive dresses, flowy and all linen. Nothing cheap. And dressing my girls the same.
Would I still like to be an actress? Sure. But not now because my life turned out differently.

I remember reading that her stove was 27k. Someone disputed that only to google and they found the stove. They aren't poor, just rich farmers. I saw her in a different light then. She seems to love her life. She enters beauty parents and I believe she has another account for that side.

I heard about her on here:

omny.fm/shows/sounds-like-a-cult/the-cult-of-tradwives

I read the interview too.

The whole thing makes me uneasy. Feels a bit coercive. Although we can't know, obviously, but it feels like he's pimping her, somewhat. The interviewer's reports of him answering for her made uncomfortable reading.

I would not like to think of one of my daughters being seduced away from exciting opportunities to follow her passion by a controlling man - and landed up milking cows with eight children swinging off her hair.

Not at all against full-time housewifery as a positive choice for those for whom it is an option. This is a whole different thing, isn't it.

I can't get worked up about white women on Tik Tok saying that the ballerina farm article is the worst thing they've seen this week, in the same week that footage was released of Sonya Massey being shot in the head by the police she called to help her.

Before anyone says you can care about both things at once, the point is that most of the white women on Tik Tok posting videos about ballerina farm (a millionaire influencer who makes her own life choices), said nothing about Sonya Massey although the news broke at the same time.

White feminism is selective, racist and toxic, and cares more about a rich trad wife with choices and agency making money off her trad wife choices, than it does about a dead black women whose only choice was making the mistake of calling the police when in need. The fact that this thread in a few hours has already got more posts on Mumsnet than the thread about Sonya Massey is proof of the toxicity of white feminism.

It's heartbreaking.

You have to be so fucking talented to get into Juillard and she made it - then got pressured into having a baby and had to give up her dreams forever.

@sunsetsandboardwalks That's the thing that really tugged at me, when she said that her "dream" had been New York City. She's ended up isolated on a bloody farm in the middle of nowhere.