Shattered Dreams

by Irene Spencer

  Now, at last, I have a husband who’s devoted to me alone. Hector J. Spencer married me nineteen years ago, making me his only wife. I treasure his love. It may seem simple to him, but he fulfilled my lifelong dream of being the favorite.

  I value the drive and honesty I found within myself as I struggled through trials and suffering in my life. I learned to trust myself, to appreciate and believe in my lifestyle and the choices I make as I live each day. Somewhere along the way, I learned to follow my own path rather than blindly obeying what others wanted or demanded of me.

  Twenty years ago, I became a born-again Christian, as did many of my children. It took me very much by surprise, most especially because it cost me nothing. At my son Kaylen’s insistence, I moved to Anchorage, Alaska, taking my Book of Mormon with me to show him how he’d been misled when he converted to Christianity a few years before. There was no sacrifice in being a Christian. It seemed too easy to just confess Christ as your savior and think you were saved. I knew we needed to work for our salvation. I couldn’t believe Kaylen turned against Mormonism so easily. (As I’ve said, the roots of effective brainwashing can extend quite deep, and my deep roots had never been fully extracted, despite all my experiences.)

  Once I arrived in Alaska, Kaylen invited me to Abbott Loop Christian Center. I accompanied him, mostly to check out what the devil he’d gotten himself into. As I entered the large sanctuary, taking my seat in a pew next to him and his wife, Jean, I felt guilty. After all my years of devotion to the one-and-only-restored-true-gospel-on-the-earth, what was I doing in a gentile church? But it was while I sat there in that open and free spiritual space that I experienced a miraculous conversion. For how long had I thirsted after God, begged him to speak to me personally, and then done whatever others told me he wanted for and from me? Now I finally heard him speaking directly to my own heart. He called me by name. “Irene, where have you been that you have never worshipped me?” Then the Holy Spirit simply revealed to me God’s unconditional, divine love, fully available right now through the sacrifice already paid by his son. I wept, ashamed to think of all the years I struggled to become a goddess and one day join my husband as the rulers of our own world. I was overcome by God’s mercy and love that had been there all along, just waiting for me to receive them. After years of religious sacrifice and suffering, I finally understood that Christ really is sufficient.

  Never again would I have to jump through strange, agonizing hoops in order to cajole God into accepting me. In fact, the god I’d been taught all my life to worship and obey didn’t really exist at all. That god was not very powerful, not very good, and he required us to completely reject some of the most beautiful things the true God had for us. The deep human desire to unite exclusively with one person of the opposite sex is not evil and is not to be shunned. God set it up that way before the Fall, and he never changed it. He certainly never declared it a sin. My belief in what the Mormon fundamentalists taught about God and salvation had been so sincere, I embraced their miserable prescription for life and marriage. One can be sincere and at the same time be sincerely wrong.

  Mormonism adopted polygamy from an ancient social custom from biblical times and made it into an essential principle for exaltation in heaven. Along the way, polygamy became a means of controlling believers and turning them into submissive pawns. Through it, prophets controlled believers and men controlled women, all allegedly in accordance with God’s will. No one seemed to acknowledge how terrible it was for everyone to live it—women, children, and men as well. I certainly couldn’t look at Verlan’s life and say that his many marriages brought him more joy than hardship. The hardship itself is taken as a reason to carry on; it’s held as a martyr’s badge of honor. Mostly, though, it’s just denied. The only reason polygamy works at all is because the people who practice it so fiercely believe they are living God’s will.

  I decided it was finally time for someone to tell it like it is. All the books I’d read on Mormon polygamy were vivid accounts of sacrificing women who upheld and emphatically stated they loved the Principle. I was convinced that these committed women simply did as I’d been taught to do—doggedly affirm the truth and righteousness of plural marriage and stubbornly maintain its advantages over monogamy. Forbidden to acknowledge their true feelings, they smothered their own agony and wrenching pain, just as I’d so emphatically been instructed to do.

  I’ve personally known hundreds of plural wives. Their smiles are a façade required of them by their husbands and spiritual leaders. It’s up to the women to make plural marriage appear to be the superior mode of marriage. It’s demanded that the wives present themselves as united with one another, with their husbands, and with their religious communities. The success of plural marriage depends entirely on their willingness to play the sacrificial role and play it well.

  At one time or another, when their tender hearts were bursting, many of these women broke the rules by revealing to me the strain and sorrow they experienced every day. I’ve seen polygamous wives stamp their feet in defense of their lifestyle, even while the truth is engraved on their faces. I’ve seen wives who have no light left in their eyes, who have relinquished all their rights and dreams. I’ve seen many manic-depressive wives who succumb to complete emotional/nervous breakdowns and many neglected ones who succumb to the tantalizing lure of adultery. Almost all the faithful polygamous women I’ve known have been resigned to lives of bare existence, their joys, hopes, and dreams forfeited until the next life.

  Like them, I’d vehemently defended polygamy for decades. It was my only sense of identity. I sacrificed everything else for it, so I desperately needed it to be true. I remember parroting the inane arguments of early Mormon prophets who claimed that polygamy would do away with all of society’s ills. There would be no adultery because if a woman fell in love with a married man, she could honorably have him. There would be no prostitution because if one wife didn’t “understand” or welcome her husband sexually, he had several other wives there to satisfy his needs.

  After all, no one woman can fully satisfy a man anyway. I’d heard it said many times that a man may love one woman sexually, another for her intelligence, and yet another for her cooking (that was me). Though every man vowed he loved his wives equally, the obvious truth was very different. Every man I knew had a legal wife, who was usually the dominant wife, and a favorite wife, whom all the others resented most. And many polygamous men, no matter how earnest they are about obeying God’s laws, at some point use plural marriage to justify adultery. Perhaps they consider it their due for all the rest they go through.

  A product of four generations of polygamy, I’d been trapped in that closed society, believing we were God’s chosen people. I’d been taught to dread intermingling with the “wicked gentiles” outside our sect. God commanded that we become a “peculiar people,” keeping ourselves separated from the vile customs of society. But my distrust diminished with each outsider I met. Their warm acceptance, which I thought I’d have to beg for, was freely given. People “outside” esteemed me as an individual, not because of my religious beliefs.

  Writing my story has brought me healing. But this book doesn’t tell it all. It doesn’t describe the terror to which my infamous brother-in-law, Ervil LeBaron, subjected us for several years. He ordered the deaths of at least twenty-eight of our family, friends, and church members. I was one of the people on his death list, which helped inspire me to go along with many of our moves throughout Mexico and Central America. While I wrote this book, Ervil cunningly seemed to be taking it over, as he was prone to do with everything. So I ripped out page after page about him, realizing that this has to be my story—the story of my shattered dreams as a polygamist’s wife and my journey into the light of God’s unconditional love.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IRENE SPENCER lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her husband of nineteen years, Hector J. Spencer. During the twenty-eight years of her polygamous first marriage, Irene gave birth to thir
teen children (all single births) and adopted a newborn daughter. Irene has 118 grandchildren and 37 great-grandchildren.