Why a Mom of 5 Gave Up Her Marriage to Start Over at 44 and Now Challenges Viral 'Tradwife' Videos (Exclusive)

“A man is not a plan,” Jennie Gage says. “Your financial future and your children’s financial stability should not be dependent on your husband loving you”

Jennie Gage has built up a large social media following under the name LifeTakeTwo, because she feels like she’s doing her life all over again.

At 44, she says, she opted out of the more traditional, religiously conservative world she had built for herself as a wife and mom of five and had to start over.

Now Gage, 49, of Tucson, Ariz., speaks openly about her experience before and after she stopped being a self-described “tradwife.”

“For 24 years I was under stress," Gage tells PEOPLE. "Only in hindsight can I say that raising five babies under the age of 10 [had] my hair falling out from my anxiety. But on the outside it looked so good.”

Gage is outspoken against the traditional lifestyle that has become increasingly popular — and controversial — on social media platforms, featuring women in domestic settings embracing the homemaker label, right down to milling their own wheat for bread.

Supporters say “tradwife” content just expresses a particular set of more conservative values and is not unlike so many other social media posts about cooking and parenting. And, observers have noted, some popular influencers associated with the trend have been clear about how they keep an equal partnership with their spouses, regardless of how it looks.

But critics argue it undercuts the push for women’s equality. Millions of people consume it online.

Gage, who was featured in the spring on the Tamron Hall show to talk about “tradwives,” knows where she stands.

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“My kids were all beautiful and accomplished and it looked like the perfect life,” she says. “Instead of seeing this isn’t working, it was ‘Look how beautiful it is.’ I was gaslighting myself.”

At an early age, the Arizona native took on a caregiving role for her four younger siblings, she says.

She says being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints put added pressure on her to marry early and bear a large family. And being “sealed for all eternity” under her marriage vows to ex-husband Jason Green added an extra layer to their relationship.

Gage says a mutual friend set them up on a blind date, telling her “we have a returned missionary friend you should marry.” Their first date was in June. On their 11th date — “within six weeks of meeting,” Gage says — she and Green were married at a temple in Portland, Oregon, on July 28, 1995.

“And after a few months, I knew I had made a mistake,” Gage now says.

(Reached by PEOPLE, Green offered a sharply different view of their relationship but appeared reluctant to talk about it in the press, criticizing Gage for talking about him in public. Still, he acknowledged, "We never worked on the root cause of issues we had.”)

Although Gage believes it’s up to the individual woman to decide what is right for her, she also believes they need to walk into it with their eyes wide open.

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“I was probably not designed to be a Mormon stay-at-home mom,” Gage says with a quick laugh. "My upbringing was in many ways a housewife immersion program designed to prepare me for nothing but wifehood."

After high school, she attended Brigham Young University-Idaho, a private college run by the church in Rexburg, where she earned an associate’s degree. But says she quickly discovered her plans to continue her education were derailed by her early marriage and growing young family.

Gage says that she and Green lived in a large home, had a garage full of cars and took nice vacations. But on the inside, she was struggling for years and years and just didn’t realize it.

Green, for his part, told PEOPLE they began having problems in their marriage early on and by about the seventh year, the damage was done.

Gage says she pondered leaving the marriage for years. But didn't know how she could manage it.

Then, Gage says, she discovered Green had been cheating on her for years. (Green tells PEOPLE she was the first to stray, something she denies.) She says she tried for years to work things out and thought perhaps the cheating was done. Then she says she discovered he had done it again.

In October 2018, despite having three children still at home, Gage knew it was time to walk away. But it came at a tremendous cost to her, she says: She tried to kill herself.

“I survived suicide — barely, barely,” she says. “They saved me, but I was in a coma for 10 hours and have a brain injury.”

“Leaving the church just broke me. It was very out of character for me,” Gage says of her attempt to die by suicide.

But then, she recalls, “One day at rehab, a man sat next to me and asked if I had ever heard Will Smith’s ‘brick-by-brick’ speech.”

It’s well-known advice that the actor has given before. “You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t start there,” Smith has said. “You say, ‘I’m gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid,’ and then you do that every single day and soon you have a wall.”

Gage says the story spoke to her at a time when she was so discouraged and didn’t know how she was going to continue with her life.

She says her world just fell out from under her when she decided to leave her marriage and her church. She lost her home, her dog and any financial stability she had. She says she also lost the support of most of her large Mormon family, who “shunned her” for leaving her religion.

Her and Green’s oldest son was serving his own Mormon mission at the time of their split and their eldest daughter had just turned 18. She also had a 14-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son. And no way to support them financially, she says.

"I had nowhere to go,” Gage says. “I was recovering from an ovarian tumor, I never had a job. I didn’t have a bank account. I didn’t even know how to file for divorce.”

Even though she helped build two businesses with her ex-husband, Gage found herself at 44 with no marketable skills after she opted out of her 24-year home-based wife life.

“A man is not a plan. Your financial future and your children’s financial stability should not be dependent on your husband loving you,” Gage says.

Newly single, she says she faced tough questions about building a future.

“How do I ever have a home again? How do I ever even live with my kids again? How do I get a job? I haven't worked since I was 19. I've never had a credit card. How do I live with $6 in my bank account?” Gage says about her state at the time. “I was looking at this huge picture and it was so overwhelming that I decided I couldn't continue to live.”

But that moment in rehab, when she heard about Smith’s speech, was a turning point — a lesson that “you can't look at that whole big wall, just look at one brick.”

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So Gage says she started flipping furniture she found at local thrift stores and began working telephone sales. Now, she also makes some money from her social media following and is almost finished writing a book about her life.

She fell in love again, too: Since May 2019, she’s been “happily together” with Kevin Reinke, a teacher who she says recognized her immediately because he had been one of her social media followers.

“He was getting gas at the pump behind me, I thought he was gorgeous and decided to say hello,” Gage recalls.

She feels life is better for her now as she marks her own path with Reinke and her children and one grandchild.

“I'm on social media to paint a picture of independence and happiness," she says, adding, "We have good friends, and Keith’s parents have become substitute grandparents to my kiddos. So I lost my family, but the people that I have in my life now love me. And I'm just taking it one brick at a time.”

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