Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage (28 page)

While I certainly benefited from being given an additional forum to work through some of my personal issues, when the show began to air, our family suffered both individually and as a whole. Right before the first episode premiered, an article appeared in a Utah newspaper about our family and the upcoming reality show.

I was working at a rehabilitation center for troubled youth at the time. Again, I was in a situation where I felt it was best to keep my family and religious beliefs to myself. When one of my coworkers read the article, she was shocked, not because of my beliefs, but because I hadn’t been open with her. “I had no idea you had this lifestyle,” she said. The fact that I was a sister wife didn’t bother her at all. I felt relieved that she now knew, and still accepted me as her friend—and I hoped my employers would be just as accepting.

I had discussed my lifestyle and our family being on a reality show with my immediate supervisor, who had subsequently discussed the situation with upper management. No one seemed concerned for six weeks—but the day after the series premiere
of
Sister Wives,
the Lehi City police department sent out a press release that they had been investigating our family. The next time I went to work, upper management called me into the office and fired me. I was devastated. All I wanted to do was help troubled kids, and I was being terminated because my employer was afraid of somehow being involved with this police investigation. They said to me, “Meri, what happens if the police show up here at the facility?” Management told me that they were not firing me because I was a polygamist, but because they were concerned the investigation would bring unwanted attention to the facility and the children housed there. Suddenly, I’d gone from being a private person to being a public figure, and a controversial one at that.

Losing my job was the most difficult thing I suffered as an individual once the show aired. It made me question whether or not our family had really done the right thing in going public. At my core, I knew it was right for us, but suddenly having to deal with losing a job that I loved and was very good at made me angry.

Our kids started to come home from school on almost a daily basis with new questions or comments from classmates about their dad being prosecuted. I remember one time the kids told us that a neighbor boy had told them that he had heard Kody was going to jail. Sometimes when our kids were playing outside or walking home from school, they would see a police car on the road and get nervous, wondering why he was driving down our quiet street. Bombarded by these questions and fears, we felt it would be the best thing for us to move away and try to bring some sort of peace back to our children.

While the move was difficult on the parents, it was terrible for our children, who were being separated from their friends and the only life some of them had ever known. I can’t blame them for thinking that we had done something terrible to them by
forcing them to move. It’s difficult for them, especially the older children who had deeper roots in Utah, to appreciate the positive impact of the show, when all they can see is that because of the show, they had to leave their friends behind.

I know that when the dust settles, the children will begin to understand how important this show is. Already, their lives are so much different from what they used to be. They attend large public schools in Las Vegas, where they are open about being brothers and sisters. They acknowledge one another in public in a way that was nearly impossible for my generation. They have many new friends, from all different faiths and backgrounds, who accept them and do not judge them. The show has demystified our lifestyle and allowed the kids to be kids.

The show has opened up new avenues to the adults as well. The veil of secrecy behind which we had been hiding has been completely obliterated. I feel such a sense of relief that I can finally be open with so many of my oldest friends. Last summer, I was able to introduce Robyn and Christine and many of our kids to my dear friends who ran the trophy engraving shop in Wyoming, where I worked all those years ago.

It’s wonderful to be open in public. We no longer worry about what it looks like when Kody and four wives go to a restaurant together. We are proud to be a family. It’s also great to get so much positive feedback and support from complete strangers on the street. However, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to people coming up to me and telling me that I’m their favorite wife. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Although we are recognized around our neighborhood in Las Vegas, it completely took me by surprise when people in New York and Chicago approached me on the street on our publicity tours. I almost have to laugh whenever anyone uses words like “celebrity” or “famous” to describe me. I’m neither of these. I’m just a mom and a wife who happens to be on TV. I’m just me.

Doing the show has allowed us to see some amazing cities and meet amazing people, all while causing us some of the worst stress we’ve ever had. We’ve visited Times Square, Hollywood, and Chicago. We’ve met Ellen and Rosie, and the four oldest kids even got to meet Oprah with us. I was so excited when I had the opportunity to introduce myself to Matthew McConaughey, only to have Robyn and Christine ruin the moment by acting like giddy fourteen-year-olds around him! I’ve been a huge fan of Matthew’s for years. Although it’s not true, I often tease Kody that Matthew is the reason I let him grow his hair long.

When we travel for the show, we get booked in some fantastic high-rise hotels with awesome views. One of my favorites was looking out over Central Park in New York City. I know this sounds like such a wonderful experience, but the downside is that when we’re on these trips, we are usually going, going, going, to the point that we don’t get to enjoy the room or the view at all! On most occasions, we’re up at the crack of dawn, running all day, only to come back to the room too late at night to do anything but fall into bed and try to be ready for another day. Sometimes, because of the tight schedule we’re usually up against, our emotions can really get the best of us. One thing we have all had to learn to do through this is to get phenomenally better at patience, kindness, and forgiveness.

In addition to the ups and downs of travel, there’s also the negative publicity we’ve had to deal with. Once you become a public figure, you lay yourself open to that. I know that there will always be someone who has something unpleasant to say about my marriage, my hair, my weight, or any number of other things—it just comes with the territory. My way of dealing with it all? I choose to ignore the polls and commentary on the Internet about our show or family members. I have more important things to do with my time!

In many ways the show has unified us. When we travel together,
we are a tightly knit group. We don’t let anyone breach our boundaries because together we exhibit strength in numbers, which is the backbone of our family unity. Being open in public has only reinforced that. Our strength in the face of public scrutiny is what makes us special. It’s what makes our show positive and important for us and for our children.

Once I converted to the fundamentalist faith, I realized how easy it is to be a Mormon in Utah. Even though Mormons only make up 50 percent of the population there, I’ve read that an estimated 80 percent of the lawmakers in Utah are LDS. When I married Kody, I was no longer a member of this dominant group. I was fringe. I was an outsider.

In polygamous communities, there is a great deal of cultural fear. People my mother’s age regularly shared personal experiences of having their families split up by the government. These stories had a great impact on me, and I became very worried about someone finding out I wasn’t like them. I kept my head down. I rarely discussed my family and private life with outsiders or colleagues.

The
Sister Wives
television show, which changed my way of thinking and brought me into the public as a polygamist, was a slow and gradual evolution. Of course, I was nervous about exposing our family. However, the more we talked about the show the more enthusiastic I became.

While we were filming the first season, I got swept away by
the project. It was exciting. A new energy had been injected into our lives. I was so caught up in filming and all the coordination that comes with mobilizing our entire family to move as a unit to various shooting locations that I didn’t give much thought to the fact that the show would eventually be seen by, we hoped, millions of people.

I wasn’t nearly as afraid while we were filming the first episodes as when we finished. Suddenly, the show was done. They were editing it. It was going to be on the air. There was no turning back.

The summer before the show aired, I was stressed out beyond belief. Many of our peers had parents who were put in jail during the governmental raids of the 1950s. There had been no recent raids on our communities. The raid in Texas was on an FLDS community, a completely different group from ours. But the stories in our cultural memory suddenly took on a new life for me, especially at three o’clock in the morning when I was lying awake in bed.

I couldn’t put my worries aside, even going so far as to seek counseling at one point. This annoyed Kody. Before the network announced our show as part of the fall line-up, Kody told me, “You need to think more positively. This is a positive thing for our family, our faith, and the world.” I tried, but I’m more of a realist than my husband.

After my concerns about my family, one of my gravest worries was about my job. I’m completely career minded and working means a great deal to me. To make things more difficult, I worked for the government in a job I loved. If there was any employer who would fire me, I was sure it would be this one.

In Utah, everyone always assumes that you are Mormon, especially if you don’t smoke or drink. Since I was raised LDS, it was easy for me to be a chameleon at work. I could talk the talk
and walk the walk. I wanted to seem Mormon enough not to draw attention to myself. This was easy since I understood conversations about aspects of conventional Mormonism, such as “visiting teaching lessons,” and “wards.” While I understood this sort of office chatter, I always stayed on the periphery of these conversations.

Sometimes I tried to throw my coworkers off the scent about my religion and disassociate myself from all forms of Mormonism, LDS, or fundamentalist. I started drinking coffee, something Mormons are prohibited from doing. I sorely needed caffeine at work when I had five kids under the age of six! I’m not sure what my coworkers thought when I started drinking coffee, but they never once asked me about my faith.

Before we traveled to Los Angeles to introduce
Sister Wives
to the public, I still hadn’t come clean to my coworkers and my superiors about either my lifestyle or the show. I was nervous about having this conversation. Kody told me not to bother. He urged me to let them discover the show on their own. We had no idea it would become front-page news in Utah.

It’s not in my nature to share more than necessary, but I felt that the ethical thing to do was to tell my supervisors the truth about the show and my family. I figured if I was to be terminated, I wanted to allow them to do it discreetly before
Sister Wives
began.

I waited to tell them until the day before we left for California to announce the show to the Television Critics Association. After all, I wanted to keep my paycheck as long as possible. It took a moment for my bosses to get over their initial shock—not only was I a polygamist (because I didn’t look like one), I was going to be a public one. After we finished talking, they went to the Human Resources Department to see what should be done about my situation. The people in Human Resources were very
open-minded. They told me that as long as I never mentioned my job, what I did in my private life was up to me—even if my private life was going to be on television.

I was thrilled with this outcome, since I had been expecting the worst. Contrary to conventional belief, Utah is quite diverse: My coworkers were a mixed bag of races, religions, and sexual persuasions. When I came out as a polygamist, I was delighted to discover no discrimination in my workplace. As I see it, God loves everyone equally regardless of lifestyle, religion, or race. I was glad to find that my superiors seemed to hold the same opinion.

Despite everything, I was still unbelievably nervous when it came time to announce the show. At the Television Critics Association, we waited backstage while they played a clip from the show. After the clip finished, we were ushered onto the stage in front of a room full of critics. There was no going back.

Immediately, a journalist from the
Deseret News
in Salt Lake raised his hand. “Aren’t you worried that you’re going to go to jail like Tom Green?” he asked.

My two greatest fears coalesced into this one question. First off, the world thought we were criminals who would be sent to jail. And even worse, we were being compared to Tom Green, an independent Mormon fundamentalist who had been jailed for statutory rape after marrying his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter. But ending these sorts of repulsive comparisons was reason enough to go public with our story. Although this was precisely the reaction I most feared, it also told me that what we were doing was necessary and right.