Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage (15 page)

One of the benefits of plural marriage is that you are forced to confront your own weakness of character and work on being the best wife, sister, and mother you can be. I’m confident that I would not be the person I am today if I had chosen a monogamous marriage.

When Robyn married Kody, she thanked Janelle, Christine, and me for training him to be the guy he is now. Like myself, Kody is so much more emotionally mature than he was when we married. But Robyn is not the sole beneficiary of this growth.
After twenty-two years, Kody and I are better than ever. We share a deep and passionate love, and finally understand each other’s love language.

When we moved to Las Vegas, we soon discovered that we weren’t going to be able to find a house both large enough for the family and with the specific qualities we needed. We decided instead on four separate homes so each wife and her children would have the space they needed to nurture their individual relationships with Kody, while at the same time choosing homes close enough together that we could still function as a family. While I wish for Mariah’s sake that she could be closer to her siblings, I’ve really learned to love my space. Some days, I want the chaos of the whole family, and some nights, when Kody isn’t around, I want to be able to sit up and watch TV, read a book, or work on a project as late as I want without disturbing anybody. Essentially, I have the best of both worlds.

Since we moved to Las Vegas, and are in separate homes with an even busier schedule than we once had, I don’t always see Kody every day. In fact, recently we went five full days without seeing each other! With the growth that our relationship has had in the past couple of years, I often think of the saying, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” When I do see Kody, it always feels new and refreshing. We’ve missed each other and we are delighted to see each other.

When we go to family reunions and I see my family members who are monogamists, I often wonder, “How can you have your husband around all the time? When do you have time for yourself?” I can’t imagine their lifestyle. But then again, they can’t understand mine either. I would never trade my experience with sister wives and the wonderfully large and dynamic family we share for the simplicity of monogamy. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

I was enchanted with the idea of polygamy when I married Kody. I was in love with my new faith, with the possibilities of love, family, and sisterhood it offered. I imagined that my new sister wife, Meri, would immediately become my best friend. I believed that Kody would have no trouble navigating between us. I was so taken with the storybook notion of happily ever after that I was completely unprepared for the reality that awaited me.

Immediately after moving in with Meri and Kody, I began to lose my sense of self. While I never once doubted that I’d made the right decisions in choosing both Kody and my new faith, I struggled to find my way in my new life and lifestyle.

When I was young, I lacked self-esteem. I struggled with body image and didn’t excel in any particular area in school. As I grew up and graduated from high school, I slowly started to find my way in the world. I realized what was important to me and what I valued. I discovered that I enjoyed working. I knew that in addition to having children, having a career would be one of the things that would matter most to me and bring me a sense of security and happiness.

I have always been happiest when I’ve devoted myself to my work. Although I wasn’t sure what career path to follow—human resources, accounting, bookkeeping—I was determined to advance myself in the workplace. Especially when my first marriage failed, working gave me inner strength and confidence.

After Kody and I returned from our honeymoon, I moved into the guest bedroom of his and Meri’s house. In no time, I came to feel like a guest who had overstayed her welcome. I felt like I’d barged not just into their house but into their marriage. Meri and I went from cordial to frosty overnight. We sniped at each other over the smallest things. When she was younger, Meri had quite an overbearing personality.

It was clear I was unable to do anything right—or rather, in a way that suited Meri. I folded Kody’s clothes incorrectly. I bought the wrong dish soap and put away the dishes in the wrong places. I learned never, ever to fold Meri’s laundry for her, but to leave it in the dryer long after the buzzer signaled that it was done. She made it clear I was disrupting her household.

I was raised in a family that believed in keeping the waters smooth—I’m a pleaser. I was raised to be nonconfrontational. So I caved to Meri on all fronts. Many, many times I wanted to tell her off, give her a piece of my mind, but I just buttoned my lip and did things her way as best as I could.

I never felt as if the house was mine in any way. I kept to my bedroom as much as possible. We were all so young then and new to this principle in both theory and practice. I know now that our experience is by no means unusual for young plural families and that the first year of living the principle is far and away the most difficult. Many couples do not press past this year. But divorce was never a question for us. We were committed to the lifestyle, as difficult and stressful as it may have been.

Our main problem was that we all lived under one roof, which never allowed me sufficient alone time with Kody. Kody didn’t
know how to behave as my husband in Meri’s house. When we watched a movie together at night, Kody and Meri would sit together on the couch while I felt left out in the cold. So I learned to separate myself.

I began to physically distance myself as much as I could in our very small three-bedroom mobile home. I didn’t spend much time in the common areas, instead setting up my bedroom as my living space. Kody was gone at his sales job from six thirty in the morning until ten thirty at night, six days a week, which made it even more uncomfortable. I would spend time at work, go out to spend time at the family ranch, and then come home and go straight to my room.

I continued to pursue my study of Native American arts and crafts and wild plant herbology, both of which were easier to undertake in the rural environment of the family ranch. My mother and Kody’s father lived only a half hour away, so I spent as much time as I could up there. I threw myself into life on the ranch, helping out as much as I could. Working outdoors helped me create an identity for myself outside of the family that I had just joined. It allowed me to clear my head and regain some sense of self.

Meri and I were stuck at home with our disagreements far too often in the first years after I joined the family. We rarely spoke to each other, but we tolerated each other. We were like roommates who didn’t get along but managed to live together all the same. This was not the celestial plural marriage I’d imagined. It was uncomfortable and disheartening.

Often Kody would take Meri with him when he worked out of state, which made me very resentful of her. I couldn’t just take off from work, as she seemed to be able to. But when Meri didn’t work, she didn’t get paid—I thought it was extremely flaky to blow off work for fun like that, especially when we were so broke. Some of the family clucked their tongues when they saw
Kody and Meri drive off on Sunday night after dinner at the ranch, leaving me to go home alone to our house in Powell.

I was left at home in an unfamiliar small town in Wyoming, far away from most of the people I knew. This was the first time in my life I’d lived anywhere without many relatives or friends nearby. It was a terribly bleak time for me.

My mother, of course, lived on the ranch where I spent a lot of time. She was the only person I could rely on during this difficult phase. While we were able to commiserate a decent amount, she was also going through her own adjustment period. Like me, she was new to polygamy and didn’t have all, or even any, of the answers about how things should be and how they should work.

Adjusting to any marriage, let alone a plural one, is an incredibly individual experience, and it is all-encompassing. Your entire worldview and your entire cultural, personal, and religious awareness goes through a radical upheaval. You barely have time to worry about what’s going on in the outside world. I found that I had to do so much work readjusting my own parameters and shifting my own perspectives that I didn’t think too much about my mother’s parallel experiences. While I was aware that my mother was involved in many of the same personal and emotional struggles as I was, we didn’t discuss them often. We supported each other and were available to each other, but we never explored the depths of our conversion together. We were both too wrapped up in our own transitions to examine these things as a team.

Even though my mother and I never discussed our initial experiences with polygamy with one another, it was comforting to have her within driving distance. When I moved to Powell from Utah to marry Kody, I hadn’t simply left all of my friends and family behind, but I’d also alienated many of them by accepting polygamy.

My sister and her husband tried to intervene and pull me back into the LDS faith. Some of my other family members even went so far as to stage a small-scale intervention to reconvert me, or as they saw it, save me. When I was eight months pregnant with Logan, Kody, Christine, and I visited Salt Lake. I took the opportunity to see some of my relatives. Kody and Christine had dropped me off at my relatives’ house, so I was without a car until they returned. I guess my family decided to take advantage of the fact that I was a captive audience until Kody got back. They cornered me in the living room and began hurling Mormon scripture at me. They told me that what I was doing by living with Kody (they didn’t recognize our marriage) was wrong. They said that I was giving up my blessings. I was furious and hurt. Eventually, I disengaged myself from them and told them they could “go hang it in their ears.” I ran upstairs and waited for Kody and Christine to return.

Many of my other relatives, such as my maternal grandfather, never forgave me and did not speak to me again. Over time, I’ve rebuilt many of these relationships, but those first years when I was new to the principle, losing my family really hurt. At least, I still had my mother for support. She was by my side at our family gatherings, which made me feel as if I was not entirely shunned.

Normally, I would have turned to my career as an outlet to bolster my self-confidence. But when I married Kody, I’d been forced to quit my stable job in Utah and move to Wyoming—a small town with few employment opportunities. While I did manage to find a job, I felt that I had wandered far off course from my career goals.

About six months after marrying Kody, I discovered that I was pregnant. Naturally, I was thrilled. I had something of my own, something that would, at least in part, make me feel as if I were an important member of the Brown family. Even though I hadn’t managed to figure out who I was and how I fit into the
family I had joined, I was proud to be bringing the first child into our world.

I knew that it would be uncomfortable telling Meri that I was pregnant. She had been unable to conceive after three years of marriage. However, I have to say that I didn’t care how she felt about my news. If it upset her, so be it. Things were incredibly tough in our relationship, so her feelings were of little importance to me at that moment.

Kody, of course, was beyond excited at the thought of becoming a father. But our happiness did little to smooth over the tensions in the household. During my pregnancy, relations between Meri and me reached an all-time low. I was physically exhausted and sick, which weakened my ability to put up with Meri’s snide remarks and jabs. While she never overtly made me feel unwelcome in the house, I rarely ventured out into the rest of the home. I felt completely disenfranchised, even though I was carrying Kody’s child.

Just before one of those trips when I was being left behind once more, my pregnancy hormones were making me feel especially vulnerable. Kody had taken a new job logging on a mountain, and I was upset to learn that he was again taking Meri with him. Meri took advantage of the situation to be exceptionally brutal. One of my friends and I had experimented with my makeup. As I was crying that I was being left behind, Meri began to ridicule the makeup I was wearing. This was the final straw after all the passive-aggressive behavior and snide remarks I had been dealing with for so many months. I completely lost it. I felt as if I was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. Kody was on his way out the door when I stopped him. There were tears running down my face.

“I just need to know that you love me,” I said.

A strange expression spread across Kody’s face. I felt as if he was going to laugh, not out of cruelty, but out of relief.

“Of course I love you,” he said.

“That’s all I needed to hear,” I told him.

“That’s it?” Kody said. “That’s all I needed to say?”

I managed to nod through my tears. The smallest things make the greatest difference. But we were all so young and we had taken on so much. Kody had a lot of learning to do. He was still a naive twenty-five-year-old. His father, his mother, Meri’s parents, and my mom were giving him advice from all sides. But ultimately, Kody would have to listen to himself and to his wives to achieve his own emotional maturity and understanding.