Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage (16 page)

Right before I gave birth to Logan, Kody began courting and then married Christine. I was so committed to the principle that it didn’t occur to me to be jealous. In fact, I was really excited at the prospect of having a wife in the family besides Meri and me. I suspected that Christine’s arrival would take a lot of Meri’s focus off me—get me out of the line of fire, if you will.

During their brief courtship, I was heavily pregnant, so I didn’t have a lot of time or energy to worry about a new sister wife. I didn’t know Christine as well as Meri did, but she seemed nice and sweet—if a little naive. It was clear to me that Christine didn’t just want a relationship with Kody, she wanted to join our family, which made me happy. It seemed like she would be a good fit with us. I expected we would be better friends than Meri and I were, and I looked forward to that.

Christine joined the family only a few months before Logan was born. She and I had our differences, but nothing serious. At first, Christine came across as something of a little princess. I was baffled by the fact that Christine didn’t believe that she needed to work in order to contribute to the family. (It’s funny to say these things now, because over the years, Christine has morphed into the cornerstone of our household’s stability and has worked tirelessly for everyone.) Back then, however, she had
little experience living apart from her parents, and was clueless about many practical things. Initially, this grated on me.

Despite these minor misgivings, Christine was a boon to our family. Almost overnight, the atmosphere in the house changed. Christine took Meri’s focus off of me, and some of the tension started to evaporate. Christine had grown up in the principle so she knew the joys and the pitfalls of plural marriage. She was incredibly cheerful and energetic, and she saw the world through rose-colored glasses. Her sunny disposition was the perfect antidote to the sour environment that had prevailed in our house for too long. As Kody likes to say, “Christine saved our bacon.”

After a few months, Christine and Meri developed a camaraderie that allowed Meri to forget her grievances against me. I was able to take care of my baby and continue working. While Christine got her own apartment a few months after she and Kody were married, I still lived in the house like a roommate—but a lot of Meri’s energy, both negative and positive, had been diverted to Christine.

Unlike Meri, who knew Christine from years back, I had no history with her. Once the dust settled between my sister wives, and they were able to put aside those initial petty jealousies that crop up at the beginning of almost any plural marriage, they spent a lot of time together. They had their own friendship, which I wasn’t part of. They would run to the store together or go off on small adventures. I felt as if I was being purposefully excluded. I have always been overly sensitive to exclusion, even if I didn’t want to be part of the activity I was being left out of. Most of the time, when Meri and Christine were going off to do their own thing, I wouldn’t have wanted to go on account of Logan. However, the simple fact that I wasn’t being invited abraded me. Groups of three women are often difficult. Someone always feels as if she is getting shortchanged even if it’s all in her imagination. Initially, when Christine joined the family, this person was me.

Once the bond between Christine and Meri was cemented, Meri was much less difficult to get along with. Our lives became more peaceful. I got a decent job at a government agency with good pay and started to feel a little more confident about my career path. While Kody and I still hadn’t eased into what most people would consider a conventional marriage—one based on romantic love—we had developed a highly functional relationship. We communicated well with each other and we complemented each other on an intellectual level.

Not long after I had Logan, Christine and Meri each bore their first children, Aspyn and Mariah. We started off on the greatest adventure of our lives—parenting an ever-growing brood of wonderful kids. A greater sense of camaraderie sprung out of raising our children together. Becoming parents as one family became the most essential part of our lives and the most defining trait of our family life.

I think that when Christine and Meri had their first children, they began to understand me a little better. After I had Logan, and before my sister wives had kids of their own, they didn’t understand why I was tired so much of the time. They didn’t understand my priorities. They thought I was complaining too much about trivial things, such as not having time to shower, do the dishes, or run errands. However, once their children were born, they were able to empathize with the challenges of motherhood and how having a child can complicate the simplest things. Once they grasped this, they were more willing to help me out. We were able to lean on one another and help to accomplish little tasks that motherhood makes difficult—cleaning, errands, talking on the phone in peace.

For the most part, Meri, Christine, and I were able to put aside our differences and create a warm and stable environment for our kids. We raised them as one family. While they may have
separate mothers, they do not think of themselves as anything other than full siblings.

I loved coparenting our kids. I was able to work while Meri and Christine homeschooled the children who weren’t sent to our church school. I felt safe and secure knowing that while I was out at the office, my children were receiving precisely the education and the care I wished for them. I never worried when my children were out of my sight. I trusted Meri and Christine to handle every situation and to make all parental decisions in my absence—in this regard, we were one team. I didn’t have to be called on whether to administer cold medicine or not. I did not have to be called when Logan hit another one of the children. Christine and Meri handled it the way they knew I would want it handled. It was lovely.

When he was little, Logan was a daredevil. He got into everything. He was fearless. One afternoon, Meri had heated up some syrup and placed it in a pitcher on the counter. It was far out of the reach of any of our children. However, somehow Logan managed to rig up a contraption made from several chairs, which he climbed up to get his hands on the pitcher. He was too small to lift the pitcher and brought it crashing down on his head. The syrup scalded his forehead. Meri knew exactly what to do to minimize the burn. By the time I got home from work, there was only a small mark on Logan’s face.

When you have as many kids as we do, these small traumas are not at all uncommon. Most of the time, when one of my kids got injured, I wouldn’t find out about it until I got home from the office. By then, everything would have been taken care of by my sister wives. Whichever child had been hurt would be soothed, and the accident was already a fading memory.

My coworkers, most of whom didn’t know I was polygamous, never understood why I was able to work late at a moment’s notice.
I was always at a loss to explain why I was so flexible regarding my home life. They didn’t understand why I was never stressed about day care and grocery shopping, play dates and doctors’ appointments for my kids. They couldn’t figure out why I didn’t need to rush home to fix dinner—or why I never, ever discussed what I was cooking. My coworkers thought I had the easiest life imaginable. Some of them even wondered if I was secretly wealthy—if you can imagine that! I didn’t explain my situation, but I did hint that I had the best babysitters in the entire world.

From the day they were born, my children entered a rich, thriving environment with various outlooks to color the way they see and appreciate the world. For all of their lives they have had the benefit of four (now five) parents who expose them to a wide range of different interests, talents, and opinions. I know it is a cliché to say it, but if it does truly take a village to raise a child, my children have grown up in the best town in America.

I’m not good at arts and crafts, and my cooking and baking skills are not anything to boast about. As always, I prefer to lose myself in my work. So my major contribution to the family is financial and practical. Thankfully, my kids never suffered from having a mother who can’t sew or bake. There are three other wonderful mothers in their lives who are creative and talented in areas in which I’m not, so my children never go without amazing Easter outfits or Halloween costumes.

If a birthday party were left up to me, I’d rush off to the supermarket on my way home from work and pick up a sheet cake with greasy blue roses. Thankfully, I have Christine in my family, who usually jumps at the chance to make something homemade. Even though Christine is extremely creative and generous with her time around the house, a lot of the time she flies by the seat of her pants. She’s so carefree and silly that she can often overlook the most basic details, such as the need to put gas in the car!
I, on the other hand, am a worrier and a planner. I make my sister wives crazy with my plans and my contingency plans, and my contingency-contingency plans. Although these differences do lead to conflicts, they make our household a fun, dynamic place.

Even though I clash with Christine and Meri from time to time, I’m thrilled that my kids have had the benefit of both of their personalities. If they had grown up with just me, there would be so many things to which I wouldn’t have exposed them. My sister wives have provided my kids with a wealth of experience, and they have helped me create six wonderful, well-rounded children.

About five years into our marriage, after Christine had joined the family and things had settled down somewhat, Kody began to mature emotionally. This change had a lot to do with the fact that Kody started taking charge of his own decisions. When Kody was new to polygamy, he often sought the counsel of elders who had grown up in the faith and now had plural families of their own. Among those he turned to for guidance were the members of Meri’s family. Obviously, learning from those familiar with the faith and principle was crucial to Kody’s development. However, no two families or situations are alike.

Eventually, Kody had garnered enough guidance from outsiders. When he began to rely on what was in his heart instead of primarily on the guidance of others, his emotional maturity began to show. He began to make decisions confidently, and he asserted what he wanted instead of what others told him to want. When this happened, he became a stronger leader in our household. He developed the confidence to take charge and stand on his own two feet.

While he still had a lot of responsibility with three wives and many little kids, he had grown into a profound sensitivity and consideration the likes of which I’ve never seen in any other man. I guess having three wives and many children taught him
how to communicate with us in clear and loving ways—and he discovered how to devote himself to each of his marriages. He burst out of the fog in which he’d been wandering during those first tumultuous years, and became the most sensitive and caring husband and parent I could have thought possible. Without his maturation, our lives as one cohesive and coherent family would never have become what they are today.

Although Kody had matured significantly, and was no longer the naive, spontaneous romantic, with such a large family we still had trouble making ends meet. For much of the first decade of my marriage, I lived with either Meri or Christine. Our house was crowded, and paying the bills was always a challenge—we never had enough money no matter how hard we worked. This was the main point of contention in any argument I had with Kody. That, and we were practically on top of one another in our small house. There wasn’t any room to breathe or think.

Kody did the best he could, and I never once doubted his commitment to me or to our children. Whenever I expressed my grievances, Kody would always remind me, “I’m committed. I’m not going anywhere.” I knew he never would. He was the one and only stalwart in my life and the best and most hands-on father I’d ever seen.

During the eighth year of our marriage, I gave birth to my fifth child, Gabriel. Afterward, I sank into a horrible postpartum depression. I felt overwhelmed by having had so many children in quick succession, and felt seriously depressed at our lack of financial means. I knew I was miserable, but had no idea how to fix the situation.

I also had a particularly nasty fight with Meri—one of the worst we’d ever had. I was at my breaking point. I couldn’t see my way out of my depression. I told Kody that I was leaving. That night, I got in the car and drove to my mother’s house.

The next morning, Kody picked me up to run errands with
him. While we were driving, he nonchalantly asked me, “So, are you better now?”

His failure to understand how low I was felt like a slap in the face. Part of me wanted to scream and part of me wanted to laugh at his ignorance and his hopefulness that everything had become better overnight. That afternoon, I bundled all the kids into the car and took them to my mom’s. I had reached rock bottom.

Until this point, the majority of my struggles within my family arose from sharing a living space. For several years I had had the means to move out and into my own place, if I’d been willing to turn my back on contributing financially to the family—but I wasn’t. When we all came into the principle, we looked down on plural families that didn’t live together. We believed that living as a unit made us stronger and allowed us to achieve necessary personal and spiritual growth quicker. As we saw it, living under one roof was the only way to do things. We had swallowed this ideal completely. So despite my struggles within the family, I was unwilling to give up on this vision that I’d held onto since I accepted polygamy.

However, after that fight with Meri, I’d had enough. My kids and I stayed with my mother for several months, until I found my own place. My job paid a decent salary, which allowed me to buy a better car, in addition to my own home. I started to build a life for myself apart from the sisterhood.

I wanted my identity as an individual apart from the family, and to achieve that, I needed my own house. I also knew that if I left our shared space, I wouldn’t be leaving the marriage or the family—Kody would have done anything he had to in order to keep us all connected, in one house or many.