Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage (17 page)

Soon after I got my own house I made one of the most important decisions of my life—I went back to school and got a degree in accounting. Getting a degree changed my world. I didn’t realize
how badly I’d wanted to do something like this. I felt personally and intellectually fulfilled. I was also certain that my career would thrive. This sense that I was taking control of my life and my future gave me invaluable self-confidence.

While I was living on my own, I was in no way cut off from the family. After a while, Kody began staying at my house on our nights together. I was also determined that my children should not feel separated from their siblings. During the day I would drive them nearly thirty miles to Christine and Meri, who would provide day care and homeschooling. On the weekends, we would get together for family meals.

Yet the separation did wonders for me. I was able to run my household as I wanted, not as my sister wives suggested. Before marrying Kody, I had always done the dishes in the morning, leaving my evenings free for relaxation. This habit—which in my mind is certainly not a bad one—drove my sister wives crazy. They insisted that I clean up at night, which irked me. Things like this may seem trivial, but over the years, small differences can really fester and come to stand for larger issues. But now, on my own, I didn’t have to worry about what anyone else thought. I could leave the dishes in the sink overnight as I liked. I could do things as they pleased me.

In addition to being able to indulge my housekeeping habits, having my own place allowed me to focus on work and on school. And perhaps because I was so busy, I didn’t have time to think about the petty stuff that was the source of so many of my earlier grievances with Meri. We moved on. Meri, Christine, and I each had our own home. We had our own kitchens—always a major source of strife—and could live as we liked without interference or comment from the others.

My happiness and my independence allowed Kody and me to enter a new phase in our relationship. I know it sounds silly to say, but after ten years of marriage, we finally had the time to get
to know each other on a more spiritual and intimate level—and to enjoy our moments alone. We became parents so soon into our marriage that we rarely had time to ourselves. When we finally did, it was refreshing and reassuring. I felt that my marriage was stronger than ever.

Two years after I’d established myself in my own house, Kody told me that he was moving the family to Utah. He had found a job for which he wouldn’t have to travel. He would be home with his kids every night.

“Okay,” I told him. “See you later.”

No way was I going to give up the peace and independence I had found. I had a great job. I had a great house. I wasn’t leaving, and most of all, I wasn’t going to live with my sister wives under one roof again. I worried about what would happen if we all lived together once more. I was stubborn. I stood my ground for almost a year. But soon I started to miss the family. And I knew that my children really missed living closer to their siblings.

As I was coming to this realization, Kody told me something that completely changed my mind regarding the move to Utah. He had found a house—a big house with three separate apartments, each with its own living quarters—kitchen, living room, and bedrooms. The house had seven bathrooms! It was a polygamous family’s dream. This was all I needed to know. My kids could be reunited with their siblings on a permanent basis. I could be close to the family, yet still have my space.

I was delighted by this development. I had been alone for months, and I could no longer deny that I was incredibly lonely. I missed my family. I missed the everyday interactions, the liveliness, and the chaos. The fact that we could all live together, yet maintain separate living quarters, felt like a dream come true. And it turned out to be just that.

The big house changed everything. We were able to be together as a family in a natural and relaxed way. I had my own
space, but my kids had their siblings and the other mothers in the same building. Most important, Kody was going to be home all the time. From the day Logan, our first child, was born, Kody has shown himself to be the best father any child could have hoped for. Now with the new house and his new job, he had the opportunity to see all of his kids on a daily basis. It was magical.

The new phase that Kody and I had embarked upon when I moved into my own house only grew sweeter in the big house. I had been so overrun with kids, my job, and my schooling that I had never allowed myself to be emotionally vulnerable to him. Throughout the first years of our relationship—especially when I was feeling unsure of my place in the family—I was determined to prove my self-sufficiency.

When I first met Kody, love was only about an intellectual connection and a friendship. I wanted a practical relationship that would provide a happy, stable environment for my children. That was enough for me. I am low maintenance when it comes to all things romantic. I prefer a good conversation and an afternoon spent together in a bookstore than all the hand-holding and sappy sweet talk in the world.

Nevertheless, I have a husband who is unbelievably sensitive to my needs and wants. He is intimately engaged with his children. He is the most logical, loving parent I’ve ever seen. So I’d lucked into the most romantic thing I could have ever dreamed of—an ideal parent with whom I also have an intellectual connection.

In the big house, I started to let down my guard and show Kody my more sensitive side. I felt confident in my place in the family, yet I had my own personal space. I have always been wary of being emotionally vulnerable. Because I’m afraid of being hurt, I throw up a wall and resist letting people in. In the big house, however, I found myself able to let him know when something
was bothering me. I allowed myself to let him see when I was hurting and to help me if I needed it.

Kody and I have forged a life together from a strange and distant beginning. We continue to evolve as a couple, exploring a more tender and romantic side of our relationship. In many ways, you could say our love story is just beginning.

My relationship with Kody wasn’t the only relationship that benefited from our move into the big house. Once I finished school and rediscovered my self-esteem, I stopped taking others’ criticism of me so seriously. I had to learn that I wasn’t going to let anyone tell me how I should act, what I should do, or how I should behave. And once I stopped listening to everyone else’s voices in my head, I began to relax around my sister wives. We came to a mutual understanding and a collective respect for our similarities and differences.

We’ve done so much growing up together. And like real sisters, we can look back on our collective struggles—our major arguments and silly squabbles—and if not laugh at them, at least shrug them off. Now we can’t even remember what half the fights were about. We’ve shared so much and been through a lot that with a word or a signal we can remind one another of an entire experience or story. We are bonded by our emotional history as well as our collective experiences.

Our life together, however, is still a day-by-day process. Every day we all have to check our natural reactions to things and temper them. We have to be careful not to say things to one another in a hurtful manner. Every decision we make has to be grounded in what is best for the entire family as a whole. It’s complicated, but it’s worth it because we’ve created something rich and intricate. If I were to lose one of my sister wives or one of her children, I would feel as if I had lost a limb.

Although Meri, Christine, and I are very different in our natures,
we have grown to share the same values. The family we have now is an amalgam of each of our individual habits. We have all contributed something to the way our family runs. My sister wives have influenced the way I see the world, and I have done the same for them. Some of these changes are moral—we are, among our culture, considered fairly open-minded, almost liberal. And some of these changes are practical. For instance, if one of my sister wives prefers to feed her kids at seven and the other at five, we’ll adopt six as our dinnertime. By adapting to and adopting one another’s traits, we’ve developed our own culture.

One of the things I had to work on once I moved into the big house with my sister wives was not falling into the pitfall of comparing my relationship with Kody to theirs. Comparison is the death of plural marriage. It leads to debilitating unhappiness. For instance, if I see that one of my sister wives has apples, my instinct is to say that I want apples, even if what I really want is oranges. I have to be true to myself and admit what I want and not simply want something because my sister wife has it. I can’t regress and say, “Kody, you love her more because you give her apples and I don’t have apples.” Our marriages are individual and we don’t want or need the same things. But awareness of what someone else has in her relationship can cause you to question yours. And this is where the danger lies. Kody is tender with us in different ways. He has different methods of expressing his love. Maybe he leaves notes for one wife, sweet voice mails for another. Or maybe the way of showing his love is by always putting someone’s kids to bed. These differences are vital to our lives. They are what make each of our marriages unique and special.

Somehow, after sixteen years, we had finally arrived at the ideal I’d envisioned when I’d accepted the principle. I was part of a happy, thriving family. We were able to make decisions as a group with a minimum of strife and bruised feelings. We
had found our groove. I didn’t think that anything could disrupt our flow.

I was fairly surprised when Kody came to me one afternoon and told me he was thinking about courting Robyn, but the way he handled it left me in awe of his emotional growth. He had learned so much from all the years with Meri, Christine, and me.

When Kody began to court Robyn, it became clear to me that he finally empathized with the difficulty I’d had coming into the family. He showed that he’d learned from my struggles, and was very careful about how slowly he integrated Robyn into our lives. He allowed her ample time to get to know each wife and all of our children individually. When they were getting to know each other, before they’d been given permission to court, Kody would bring one of the wives or several of the children down to St. George in southern Utah to spend a weekend with Robyn. In doing so, he made sure Robyn felt as if she was going to be an important part of our family—and he also let the family know that they were still as important as they’d been before Robyn came into the picture. He was very protective of Robyn, so that when they eventually married, she would feel as if she already belonged in our midst.

Kody and Robyn’s courtship coincided with a huge development in our lives. After careful consideration—and endless family discussions—we decided to participate in a reality TV show about our family. This decision wasn’t without complications. After all, there can be consequences when polygamists go public. But these unfamiliar waters certainly complicated Robyn’s entry into the family. It drew out her courtship with Kody and forced their wedding to be put off for a few extra months.

I was completely fine with Robyn and Kody’s courtship. It wasn’t until after they got married that I started to struggle. It’s hard to reconfigure your life—your needs and your children’s needs—with a new wife in the picture. My mother explains this
adjustment in a clever way. She say that wives are like spokes in a wheel—they keep the wheel balanced, grounded, and strong. When a new wife comes in, you all need to move over. It’s an uncomfortable adjustment at first, but when you get your groove back you’re stronger because of it.

Robyn brought three children into the family, which was an exciting change. We decided that a good way to integrate our families was to enroll our kids, many of whom had been homeschooled, in a public school along with Robyn’s kids. There are, of course, some parenting differences between the way we raised our children before Robyn arrived and the way Robyn brought her kids up. Since Meri, Christine, and I had so many children, we didn’t have the time or the space to baby them. If something didn’t go their way, tough. Get up, brush yourself off, get onto the next thing. We’re not catering to you.

Robyn coddles her children more, which is certainly understandable given their previously tumultuous home life. So we are learning from her and she is learning from us. This, like many things in our household, is a work in progress.

They most important thing Robyn has taught us is how to argue in a more effective and polite manner. With such a chaotic household, there are going to be a lot of family discussions. Sometimes these can become heated and they blow up. Before Robyn came into the family, our arguments would often end unresolved with raised voices and slammed doors. Frequently, we were all worse off after a family discussion than before. So from time to time, it seemed worthless to discuss anything at all.

Early on in their relationship, Robyn and Kody got into an argument. However, through example, Robyn showed him how to take the time to talk a problem out and not walk away from it before a comfortable resolution has been reached.

These days, it is often Robyn who takes the lead in our family
discussions. She keeps a cool head and navigates us through difficult waters. She never lets us leave the room until we’ve settled an issue. Thanks to Robyn, we are able to avoid bruised feelings and the long periods of unhappiness that used to follow our family talks.

Even though Robyn brought so much into our family, during the few months after she married Kody, I felt as if I were wearing shoes on the wrong feet. Our rhythm was disrupted, and I’m afraid we were all a little brutal on her. Robyn went out of her way to extend olive branches to me. She’d offer to help me with the kids’ homework on crazy days. She would pick up little trinkets or knickknacks that symbolized our family and offer them as “just because” gifts. Robyn collects Christmas ornaments, and her first Christmas with the family, she selected unique ornaments to give to each of us.