Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage (30 page)

When we decided to do the show, we never imagined we would be “TV personalities.” I’m still shocked when someone recognizes me while I’m jogging down the street at six in the morning in my sweats and sunglasses. Fame was never on our radar. Our intention was simply to educate people and increase tolerance for our way of life.

I hope that we’ll be able to do the show until it runs its natural course on television, until we’re bored with it or people are bored with us. It’s fun. But when it’s over, it’s over. Soon our kids will be in college, and after that, we’ll be busy with grandkids. We’ll look back on the show as something fun we did at one point in our lives.

I hope that when it is over, we’ll have changed people’s perceptions of polygamy. I do not understand how people cannot be
tolerant in this day and age. Once I left mainstream religion and joined an alternative faith, I grew to respect all people who recommit to their beliefs on a daily basis despite public opinion. I hope our show is a testimony to that strength. It will be our legacy. Now that I’ve experienced what a difference it makes to talk about my faith openly, I can’t imagine not encouraging others to do the same.

Throughout my entire childhood, I kept my family life as quiet as I could. I had two mothers and ten brothers and sisters. We were from a prominent polygamous family and thought it best to draw as little attention as possible to ourselves. In school, I never felt comfortable trying out for sports, plays, or any activities. I wanted to be as low profile as possible.

I was raised in a climate of fear. My father was terrified of our family being split up. When he was eight years old, his life was turned on end when his parents were arrested for bigamy and thrown in jail. They were released after a single night. (This is common, especially in the case of female polygamists, who are usually sent home to look after the children.)

My grandparents initially thought their arrest was symbolic and that they would have no more trouble with the law. Not long after their release, however, they got word that the authorities were pursuing them once again. My grandfather fled and went into hiding. All of my grandmothers separated from one another and took their children to live in different states or in far-off corners of the same state. This separation meant that my father was
permanently cut off from his siblings. For years, he had no idea where the rest of his family was.

My dad was drafted into the Vietnam War when he was nineteen. He was frustrated that he had to serve a country whose laws denied his family fundamental civil rights and caused them to live in fear. Even though my father had been separated from my grandfather, my grandfather still believed in the importance of serving America, and he urged my dad to go and be proud of who he was. Although my grandfather and his family lived a lifetime of fear, he still realized that fear leads to secrecy, and secrecy leads to abuse of power. He advocated for harsher punishment for underage marriages and abusive relationships. He believed that these crimes would be stopped if polygamists could live openly instead of in secrecy. As my grandfather saw it, secret, closed societies were directly responsible for the abuses for which the FLDS has become, sadly, infamous.

Openness in theory is a lot different from openness in practice. And while I knew that my grandfather’s theory and belief was entirely correct, incorporating it into my everyday existence took a lot of time.

I’m a very bubbly and outgoing person. As I grew older, I realized that I wasn’t always going to be possible for me to hide my family or lifestyle from everyone I met. It’s just not in my nature to mistrust the outside world as I’d been raised to do. I look on the bright side of absolutely everything. I expect the best from people. Maybe for this reason, I often let it slip, both accidentally and on purpose, that I was polygamous.

Kody often says that because of my sweet nature, people have no choice but to accept me for who I am. This is honestly the best compliment he could pay me. Perhaps because of my blind trust in the good in humankind—or maybe because I’m a chatterbox!—people began to learn about my family. Their reactions were far more positive than I’d been raised to expect.

Soon after I married Kody and moved to Powell, Wyoming, I got a wonderful job assisting a curator at a local museum. My boss was a fantastic woman. Since we worked in a tiny office—it was just the two of us—I knew we’d be spending an inordinate amount of time together.

The first day at work, my boss asked me about my family and my home life. I told her about my husband, Kody, and his two sisters, Meri and Janelle, who lived with us. I explained that Meri and I both had daughters and Janelle had a son. I said that my sisters-in-law lived with us for financial reasons. I acknowledged that our living situation was a little unusual, but that we made it work.

When the day was over I got in my car to drive home. I turned on the ignition but couldn’t bring myself to leave the parking lot. I hated myself for having lied to my boss on my first day of work. I turned off the car and marched back into the museum.

My boss was surprised to see me back so soon.

“I lied to you,” I said. “I’m sorry. Kody is my husband. Meri and Janelle are my sister wives. Together we have three children and I will always refer to these children as my children since we are one family.”

My boss smiled. “I had a feeling this was the case,” she said. She never judged me, and she never said a single bad word about my family or my lifestyle.

Eventually, I opened up to another woman at the museum. She was actually a little envious of the family support I had with my sister wives. She imagined it would have been useful for her when she raised her children. She’d also been wondering how I could accomplish so much at home and at work while raising children.

After I’d been married to Kody for several years, I was asked to represent our faith in a nonprofit organization, Principle Voices. Except for the FLDS, each sect of Mormon fundamentalism has
two members on the board of Principle Voices. The mission of this organization is to educate others about polygamous families and culture. The group’s goal is to empower both polygamous individuals and families, as well as to provide crisis referrals and response to those in the lifestyle.

Principle Voices is the public face of polygamy. It exists to deal with issues not just inside our culture but outside it as well. The group handles inquiries from the media—requests for interviews and assistance with research. It also interacts with the government on a regular basis, mostly through the governmental organization Safety Net.

Since I am pretty talkative by nature and was getting comfortable talking about my faith, I was often asked to do interviews with the media. Principle Voices gave us extensive media training about how to field questions regarding abuse, sex, and our faith. We were taught how to skim the surface of the question, give a truthful answer without going into too much detail. I learned how to deflect questions from my faith and sex and turn the subject to my family. The underlying principle was to convey our message about our considered and mature choices to live a plural life and to help people to understand our community. As a member of Principle Voices, I spent two years educating people about polygamy. I spoke at colleges and on the news. I became the spokesperson for our faith and I loved it.

After I had been on Principle Voices for a few years, I started to think that openness about our lifestyle might lead to more freedom. This realization coincided with an offer from a television journalist who was looking for a polygamist family to interview. Principle Voices thought my family would be a perfect fit for the show. The adults held jobs. The kids were healthy and happy. There were no underage or incestuous marriages. We were a fairly average, stable, all-American family.

I wouldn’t have volunteered my family for this experience
without first discussing it with Kody, Meri, and Janelle. Eventually, the four adults and our six eldest children flew to New York for the interview. Although we were running a risk appearing as a family in front of television cameras, the risk was tempered by the fact that the journalist didn’t have an actual television program on the air yet. He was using our story as a demo or a promo that wouldn’t be shown to the public. Although we spoke openly on the show, the whole event seemed somewhat secretive and private, which was a great relief.

Appearing on this program led us to a paradigm shift as a family. Suddenly, hiding out seemed less intimidating and less possible than it had before. The production crew mentioned doing a documentary show with our family, and even though we refused, it started to make us think about the possibilities of telling our story publicly. Although I was beginning to feel that it was time to take a public stand, I didn’t think a documentary was the right format. While I didn’t mind speaking to reporters about my own personal choices, opening our family to the world was really scary. I had legitimate concerns. I didn’t want Kody to be taken away as my grandfather had been, and I didn’t want anyone in the family to lose his or her job on account of our beliefs.

Even though we turned down the offer to do an in-depth documentary, the family continued to discuss several possibilities for going public with our story. While none of these appealed to me, Kody began to realize that living openly was something he was being called to do. He wanted to help educate people about our lifestyle and to create more understanding and tolerant world for our children.

Any documentary maker or television producer who wants to explore polygamy first goes to Principle Voices. For years, the woman who leads the organization has been fielding requests for families willing to tell their story to the public. There are very few families and individuals who want to participate in anything
that could endanger, harm, or just expose their family, especially when it comes to a large-scale media event. I was one of these people. I didn’t mind the interviews that I participated in alone, but involving my whole family had until now remained out of the question.

I was approached a few times about telling our family story. One day I told Kody how often I was asked about coming out as a family and sharing our life with the public. “Why didn’t you tell me about any of these requests?” Kody asked. Aside from the interview we had done in New York and a brief segment on the BBC that wasn’t shown in America, it hadn’t occurred to me to tell Kody about the requests for interviews. While Kody was very supportive of my role in Principle Voices and shared my views about opening up our society, I didn’t imagine that the rest of our family would want to go public.

“The next time you’re approached about telling our family story, let me know,” Kody said.

By coincidence, I’d been contacted through Principle Voices by an independent producer, Tim Gibbons, who was looking to do a reality show about a polygamous family. Kody liked the sound of the project and made an appointment to meet Tim in person. Shortly after their initial meeting, Tim came to our home to talk with us about his ideas.

We were immediately impressed with Tim’s vision for the show. He had observed the ways in which polygamists were often ridiculed, and felt a reality show could go a long way to changing that. He thought that if he portrayed our family as honestly and openly as possible and showed how essentially normal we are, that people might begin to understand that there’s not a whole lot of difference between most polygamists and the rest of the world.

Tim assured us that the crew would be small and unobtrusive. He said that they would respect our wishes whenever we
needed to deal with something off camera. Tim’s attitude and outlook were so honorable that he put the entire family at ease. Naturally, there was a great deal of debate. But in the end, we agreed to participate.

It was the right time to tell our story. Warren Jeffs was on trial and the news was flooded with pictures of him marrying underage girls. We needed to provide a counterpoint to that image. We wanted to let the world know that we in no way condone forcible or underage marriage. We do not support any organization that permits a woman to be taken from her family and reassigned to another husband. These things are not acceptable and they have no place in our world.

When we consented to the program, we told our children that they should start letting all of their friends know about our family. (Their closest friends already knew about our lifestyle.) My oldest, Aspyn, was really stressed about telling some of her friends, but when she did, it went really smoothly and everyone was very accepting of her. However, Madison, Janelle’s oldest girl, had a totally different experience. One of the girls in her class asked her if being a polygamist meant that her father molested her, she had to marry her uncle, and couldn’t wear the color red. Madison was disgusted and horrified. But she was able to demystify the truth about her family and make her friend understand that her home life is pretty normal and completely healthy.

Once Aspyn, Madison, and most of our other children had told all their friends about our family, they could bring larger groups of friends over to the big house, which they loved. The kids thought it was really cool that they could lead their friends through the house and show them the different apartments and introduce them to their different moms.