She Built Her Brand as a 'Tradwife.’ Then a Devastating Family Crisis Made Her Rethink Everything (Exclusive)

Estee Williams' daughter, Estelle, was born with a ventricular septal heart defect in September 2025. The infant is now awaiting a live-saving organ transplant

NEED TO KNOW

• Estee Williams started out on social media as a tradwife content creator, promoting the viral lifestyle trend that puts women in more “traditional” homemaker roles
• The controversial niche garnered her over 300,000 followers between her TikTok and Instagram accounts, though she announced a pivot away from tradwife posts in April 2025
• Her page has evolved even further from her old posts since she and her husband Conner welcomed their daughter Estelle, who is currently awaiting a life-saving heart transplant

Estee Williams built a social media presence by sharing tradwife content, a niche that garnered her over 300,000 followers between her TikTok and Instagram pages.

Over the past few years, Williams has leaned into the viral, controversial lifestyle trend that promotes the idea that a woman should play a more dated, homemaker-type role in the home. She's posted videos about being happily financially dependent on her husband and has urged other wives to "doll themselves up before their husband comes home."

Williams even helped define the term before it rose to popularity in the mainstream conversation. In her video posted in 2022, she described the tradwife as a “woman who prefers to take a traditional or ultra-traditional role in marriage, including beliefs that a woman’s place is in the home."

In April 2025, the influencer took to TikTok to announce a surprising pivot away from tradwife-related posts. Captioning a selfie, Williams — who was pregnant with her first child at the time — noted how she'd spent the months prior "posting more casually," sharing more content about cooking, lifestyle and fitness as well as baby updates.

"It's been good for me!" she wrote. "I'm not sure if l'll be posting much regarding the controversial tradwife movement. However, if I do it won't be as often. I so so appreciate the support so many of y'all have given my different social medias."

About 10 months after she let her followers know about the change, Williams tells PEOPLE that stepping away from that content was an "intentional decision." Instead, she says she decided to "focus fully on what matters most to me, my family."

Though she says she made the choice before she was even pregnant, it's proved be an especially poignant move given how her view of family — and her view of everything, really — has changed since she became a mother. Williams and her husband, Conner, welcomed their daughter Estelle on Sept. 5, 2025.

The newborn was immediately taken to the NICU after birth, and when Williams was two days postpartum, her child's doctors delivered the news that Estelle was born with a ventricular septal defect (VSD), meaning there was a hole in her heart.

According to Mayo Clinic, VSD is a common problem present at birth. Smaller defects can close naturally, causing the infant no problems, however infants with larger VSDs can require surgery to prevent complications.

Estelle's medical team determined that she would need to undergo open-heart surgery at some point in her infancy. At 11 weeks old, Williams and Conner took their child in for the scheduled operation, but the situation quickly changed course.

"What we once believed would be a brief hospital stay in November for a routine open-heart VSD repair turned into something none of us could have ever imagined," Williams tells PEOPLE. "During surgery, the team discovered that Estelle’s VSD was far larger than expected, measuring [three centimeters], well beyond what is considered large, and the biggest this surgeon had ever seen or repaired."

Estelle faced "an incredibly complex postoperative course," as her mom describes. She's had four heart surgeries and survived two cardiac arrests, one that lasted eight minutes with CPR and a more recent instance that lasted over an hour.

"During her hour-long code, her heart was no longer able to support her body, no pulse ever came back, and two days before Christmas she was placed on ECMO as a life-saving measure to give her organs and heart a chance to recover," Williams explains. "That’s when we were told she would need a heart transplant to leave the hospital."

Estelle is currently one of 60 children in the world supported by a Berlin Heart, an external ventricular assist device that is keeping her alive until she can receive the life-saving organ transplant. In the meantime, the infant is not able to leave the hospital, and her parents have not left her bedside.

Though Williams' social media content already shifted away from tradwife posts before Estelle arrived, the influencer's online presence evolved further when she realized the gravity of her daughter's health status.

"This experience has truly changed my life. I have never felt more scared and more blessed at the same time," she tells PEOPLE. "In the cardiac PICU, I’ve been closer to death than I ever imagined, and closer to the mercy and presence of God. The hospital is a place where grief and beauty coexist, and it’s a feeling unlike anything else."

Williams says neither she nor Conner knew much about congenital heart defects and how common they are, affecting about one in 100 newborns, per the American Heart Association. Infant heart transplants are far more rare, with only about 120 to 150 recipients each year, according to a report published in the National Library of Medicine.

With her regularly shared updates about Estelle's medical journey and wait for a transplant, Williams hopes her social media channels will serve in a more educational way.

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"I chose to share Estelle’s story to help bring awareness not only to congenital heart disease, but to the reality of life on the heart transplant waitlist and the profound scarcity of donor organs," says the new mom.

"This is not just for Estelle, but for every precious child waiting for their miracle heart," she continues. "I never truly understood how rare organ donation is, or how many children never receive the transplant they so desperately need, until now, until I became a mom with a baby waiting for a heart."

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