Jennie Gage still remembers an assignment she was given in kindergarten: What did she want to be when she grew up? She wrote that she wanted to be president.

“I brought it home, and instead of my mom being proud, she cried,” Gage said. “She said, ‘Jennie, you’re not gonna be the president when you grow up. You’re going to be a mommy, like me. Heavenly Father made you to be a mommy.’”

Gage grew up in the Mormon church. She got married while she was a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho. She said her husband discouraged her from finishing her degree; instead, they started a business together. When church leaders found out, she said they asked her to step down from the business and to focus on her family. So Gage agreed, and she raised her five children.

“I did all of the housekeeping, all of the decorating, all of the furnishing, all of the cooking, the shopping, taking care of kids, getting them to all their different sports and practices and school and homework,” she said.

Gage said her relationship was also abusive. She left the church and then left her husband. At the time, she was living in her car and feeling isolated, so she started posting on social media about what she was going through. Then, she saw tradwives trending on TikTok.

“The first time I ever saw Ballerina Farm, I didn’t realize she was Mormon. I didn’t realize she was rich,” said Gage. “She just came up in my algorithm, and I had a visceral response. I was furious.”

Ballerina Farm, the account run by content creator Hannah Neeleman, boasts nearly 10 million followers. In her videos, Neeleman posts about raising her eight children on a farm with her husband, Daniel Neeleman, whose father founded JetBlue and several other commercial airlines. Hannah Neeleman is widely considered to be one of the faces of the tradwife movement, which embraces a return to traditional gender roles. (Neeleman, in a controversial profile by The Times, said she is not sure she “necessarily identifies” with the label.)

So Gage posted her own video in response, saying: “I’m an ex-tradwife. I work three minimum wage jobs just to pay my rent.” She said it’s part of the financial reality of being a single mom without a college degree. Her TikTok video, which has now racked up over 1 million views, is one example of a growing phenomenon: ex-tradwives who try to de-influence the lifestyle by sharing why it didn’t work for them. Editor’s note: this video contains language that may be offensive.

Tradwives … and girlbosses

Since 2020, tradwives have become wildly popular on social media. Creators like Neeleman, Nara Smith and Estee Williams post videos of their day-to-day routines, often cooking elaborate meals or doing chores in beautiful outfits.

Several experts say tradwives and their renewed focus on family values are the direct aftermath of decades of “lean in” feminism, which eventually lead to a do-it-all mentality. Cinzia Solari, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston and co-author of the book The Gender Order of Neoliberalism, says the result of that mindset is a deep disillusionment with gender disparity in the workplace, paired with a growing sense of burnout from trying to do it all. “It doesn’t turn out to be sustainable,” she said. “Folks are exhausted.”

So what we’re left with, she said, are two identities that appear to be on polar ends of a spectrum: “girlbosses” who prioritize their careers over marriage and kids, and tradwives who do the opposite. But Smitha Radhakrishnan, a sociologist at Wellesley College and Solari’s co-author, said they’re actually not so different. “Tradwives and girlbosses end up in the same quadrant,” she said. “They are actually both trying to cut their work in half.”

Although tradwives are making an appeal for a return to gender roles from the 1950s – or in Ballerina Farm’s case, a return to the Laura Ingalls Wilder/homesteader pioneering era – Radhakrishnan and Solari say a key aspect of the lifestyle is the element of choice. Women are choosing to opt out of the professional world and prioritize domestic life, and for many tradwife creators, that choice carries an element of empowerment. Radhakrishnan said this is especially true for Black women who’ve been historically forced to work in the United States.

Jacqueline Beatty, who teaches history at York College of Pennsylvania and wrote about tradwives for TIME Magazine, said the rise of tradwives also coalesces with renewed interest in the role of men as protectors. She points to comments made by President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail, in which he vowed to protect women “whether they like it or not.” She said these attitudes, reflected by tradlife roles for both men and women, are reminiscent of 18th-century legal customs that placed married women under the protection and authority of their husbands. It left women unable to own property or have any legal independence from men, and set a precedent of social and political inequality.

“It’s a way to also keep their agitation for political rights at bay,” said Beatty. “You have this very special and even more important role of being a wife and mother. The vote compared to that is negligible.”

‘I wasn’t oppressed’

Sharon Johnson, another ex-tradwife with a following of more than 600,000 on TikTok, said that’s part of the reason she originally didn’t identify with the trad label. “I didn’t think that I fit into that narrative at all,” she said. “That wasn’t my life. I wasn’t oppressed. I chose this life.” Editor’s note: this video contains language that may be offensive.

But Johnson said that all started to change when she and her husband left the Mormon church three years ago. Not long after, her husband got laid off from his job — and she said it broke their family dynamic wide open. He started taking on more responsibility at home and with their six kids, while she started monetizing her social media and co-hosting a podcast to make ends meet.

“Both of us stopped having this pressure of these roles we had to play,” she said. “We are learning to have more healthy relationships with not only each other, but with our kids.”

She acknowledged that it’s not an easy transition to make; she said it’s taken a lot of therapy and teamwork to rebuild their life together. Johnson still has many friends and family members who are tradwives — and the biggest trad creators have not openly addressed the ex-trad phenomenon. But Johnson said she’s found a lot of healing and catharsis in a growing community of women on social media who are looking for a new kind of middle ground.

“I am a completely different person than I was three years ago, and our marriage is completely different, everything for the better,” she said. “I feel like I am a person, and a wife and a mother second.”

Jennifer Vanasco edited the radio and digital versions of this story.

Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director known for brightly colored films filled with melodramatic plot twists, has unveiled his first English-language feature film. The Room Next Door dives into the inevitability of death and its inextricable ties to life.

“I don’t believe in God… I don’t accept death,” the 75-year-old director told NPR’s A Martínez. His unease is shared with Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore. Her long-lost friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) has a failed cancer treatment and asks Ingrid to accompany her during her last days in upstate New York.

“As Julianne said at the beginning of the movie, it’s unnatural that something that is alive should die,” Almodóvar added. He wrote the script, which was adapted from part of Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through (2020).

Every morning, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) looks up the staircase at her friend Martha’s door. If it’s closed, Martha has said that means she has taken a lethal pill and is now dead.

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The film received the top prize (Golden Lion) at the Venice Film Festival. While it was snubbed for the best picture race in Spain’s Goya Awards, the director and his two leads all got individual nods. Swinton was also nominated as best actress for the Golden Globes.

Almodóvar says he chose to shoot The Room Next Door in English simply because the story called for it. Martha wants to die on her own terms, painlessly and peacefully, by ingesting a euthanasia pill she purchased on the dark web.

Euthanasia is legal in Spain. But it’s still banned in the United States, although some jurisdictions like Washington, D.C. and Oregon allow assisted suicide.

“If I am terribly sick, if life doesn’t offer me anything but pain, then I want to be the owner of my death,” Almodóvar said. “And I think this is a human right that we all have.”

Almodóvar’s idiosyncrasies fill The Room Next Door, including his use of saturated colors. Red, the color of blood flowing through arteries, is especially prevalent throughout this film.

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Parallel to Martha’s path toward death is Ingrid’s transformation in overcoming her own anxiety over the ethical and legal dilemma of helping Martha end her life.

In the stylish home in the woods where Martha spends her final days, there are three characters — the two women and death itself, the director explains. “Ingrid learns in that kind of sweet, apocalyptic moment how to appreciate the small things in life. She learns to appreciate nature: snow falling, dawn rising, the chirping of the birds.”

James Joyce’s short story The Dead is quoted, while pink snow falls on the scenery: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

It’s not all doom and gloom — there are moments of lightness and many of reflection. Almodóvar had initially scripted a lot more dark, wry humor, saying Swinton was up for it but Moore “was a little less so because she was afraid that it might offend people.”

L to R: Tilda Swinton, director Pedro Almodóvar and Julianne Moore appear on the set of The Room Next Door

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Almodóvar has his own ways of processing the fragility of life — by creating. “Pleasure for me is a way of running away from death, by writing and making movies,” he said.

In Pain and Glory (2019), the mother of a writer-director (Antonio Banderas) gives specific directions about how she wants to be dressed and made up after she dies. Almodóvar, who infuses his films with parts of his own life, says he had the same experience with his own mother.

The plot of this story may have called for it, but the decision to shoot his 23rd feature film in English was not an easy one for Almodóvar, who apologized for his “very bad” English in the interview and at times spoke through an interpreter.

He tested the waters first with two 30-minute shorts in English, Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice (the latter features Swinton). The experience, he said, “was like doing my first movie. I was very excited.”

Director Pedro Almodóvar operates a camera on the set of The Room Next Door

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Almodóvar then had planned to direct a feature with Cate Blanchett based on Lucia Berlin’s collection of short stories A Manual for Cleaning Women. But the travel required for the monumental project proved too daunting for Almodóvar, who had back pain after surgery, and he pulled out.

Creating The Room Next Door, which was largely shot in Madrid, has left Almodóvar “much more open to make a movie in English than before.” While it would depend on the story at play, “I discovered that I could understand the actors and the actors also understood me.”

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital version was edited by Majd al-Waheidi.