Sister Wives

by Brown, Kody;Brown, Meri

  When we go to family reunions and I see my family members who are monogamists, I often wonder, “How can you have your husband around all the time? When do you have time for yourself?” I can’t imagine their lifestyle. But then again, they can’t understand mine either. I would never trade my experience with sister wives and the wonderfully large and dynamic family we share for the simplicity of monogamy. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

  Chapter Six

  JANELLE

  I was enchanted with the idea of polygamy when I married Kody. I was in love with my new faith, with the possibilities of love, family, and sisterhood it offered. I imagined that my new sister wife, Meri, would immediately become my best friend. I believed that Kody would have no trouble navigating between us. I was so taken with the storybook notion of happily ever after that I was completely unprepared for the reality that awaited me.

  Immediately after moving in with Meri and Kody, I began to lose my sense of self. While I never once doubted that I’d made the right decisions in choosing both Kody and my new faith, I struggled to find my way in my new life and lifestyle.

  When I was young, I lacked self-esteem. I struggled with body image and didn’t excel in any particular area in school. As I grew up and graduated from high school, I slowly started to find my way in the world. I realized what was important to me and what I valued. I discovered that I enjoyed working. I knew that in addition to having children, having a career would be one of the things that would matter most to me and bring me a sense of security and happiness.

  I have always been happiest when I’ve devoted myself to my work. Although I wasn’t sure what career path to follow—human resources, accounting, bookkeeping—I was determined to advance myself in the workplace. Especially when my first marriage failed, working gave me inner strength and confidence.

  After Kody and I returned from our honeymoon, I moved into the guest bedroom of his and Meri’s house. In no time, I came to feel like a guest who had overstayed her welcome. I felt like I’d barged not just into their house but into their marriage. Meri and I went from cordial to frosty overnight. We sniped at each other over the smallest things. When she was younger, Meri had quite an overbearing personality.

  It was clear I was unable to do anything right—or rather, in a way that suited Meri. I folded Kody’s clothes incorrectly. I bought the wrong dish soap and put away the dishes in the wrong places. I learned never, ever to fold Meri’s laundry for her, but to leave it in the dryer long after the buzzer signaled that it was done. She made it clear I was disrupting her household.

  I was raised in a family that believed in keeping the waters smooth—I’m a pleaser. I was raised to be nonconfrontational. So I caved to Meri on all fronts. Many, many times I wanted to tell her off, give her a piece of my mind, but I just buttoned my lip and did things her way as best as I could.

  I never felt as if the house was mine in any way. I kept to my bedroom as much as possible. We were all so young then and new to this principle in both theory and practice. I know now that our experience is by no means unusual for young plural families and that the first year of living the principle is far and away the most difficult. Many couples do not press past this year. But divorce was never a question for us. We were committed to the lifestyle, as difficult and stressful as it may have been.

  Our main problem was that we all lived under one roof, which never allowed me sufficient alone time with Kody. Kody didn’t know how to behave as my husband in Meri’s house. When we watched a movie together at night, Kody and Meri would sit together on the couch while I felt left out in the cold. So I learned to separate myself.

  I began to physically distance myself as much as I could in our very small three-bedroom mobile home. I didn’t spend much time in the common areas, instead setting up my bedroom as my living space. Kody was gone at his sales job from six thirty in the morning until ten thirty at night, six days a week, which made it even more uncomfortable. I would spend time at work, go out to spend time at the family ranch, and then come home and go straight to my room.

  I continued to pursue my study of Native American arts and crafts and wild plant herbology, both of which were easier to undertake in the rural environment of the family ranch. My mother and Kody’s father lived only a half hour away, so I spent as much time as I could up there. I threw myself into life on the ranch, helping out as much as I could. Working outdoors helped me create an identity for myself outside of the family that I had just joined. It allowed me to clear my head and regain some sense of self.

  Meri and I were stuck at home with our disagreements far too often in the first years after I joined the family. We rarely spoke to each other, but we tolerated each other. We were like roommates who didn’t get along but managed to live together all the same. This was not the celestial plural marriage I’d imagined. It was uncomfortable and disheartening.

  Often Kody would take Meri with him when he worked out of state, which made me very resentful of her. I couldn’t just take off from work, as she seemed to be able to. But when Meri didn’t work, she didn’t get paid—I thought it was extremely flaky to blow off work for fun like that, especially when we were so broke. Some of the family clucked their tongues when they saw Kody and Meri drive off on Sunday night after dinner at the ranch, leaving me to go home alone to our house in Powell.

  I was left at home in an unfamiliar small town in Wyoming, far away from most of the people I knew. This was the first time in my life I’d lived anywhere without many relatives or friends nearby. It was a terribly bleak time for me.

  My mother, of course, lived on the ranch where I spent a lot of time. She was the only person I could rely on during this difficult phase. While we were able to commiserate a decent amount, she was also going through her own adjustment period. Like me, she was new to polygamy and didn’t have all, or even any, of the answers about how things should be and how they should work.

  Adjusting to any marriage, let alone a plural one, is an incredibly individual experience, and it is all-encompassing. Your entire worldview and your entire cultural, personal, and religious awareness goes through a radical upheaval. You barely have time to worry about what’s going on in the outside world. I found that I had to do so much work readjusting my own parameters and shifting my own perspectives that I didn’t think too much about my mother’s parallel experiences. While I was aware that my mother was involved in many of the same personal and emotional struggles as I was, we didn’t discuss them often. We supported each other and were available to each other, but we never explored the depths of our conversion together. We were both too wrapped up in our own transitions to examine these things as a team.

  Even though my mother and I never discussed our initial experiences with polygamy with one another, it was comforting to have her within driving distance. When I moved to Powell from Utah to marry Kody, I hadn’t simply left all of my friends and family behind, but I’d also alienated many of them by accepting polygamy.

  My sister and her husband tried to intervene and pull me back into the LDS faith. Some of my other family members even went so far as to stage a small-scale intervention to reconvert me, or as they saw it, save me. When I was eight months pregnant with Logan, Kody, Christine, and I visited Salt Lake. I took the opportunity to see some of my relatives. Kody and Christine had dropped me off at my relatives’ house, so I was without a car until they returned. I guess my family decided to take advantage of the fact that I was a captive audience until Kody got back. They cornered me in the living room and began hurling Mormon scripture at me. They told me that what I was doing by living with Kody (they didn’t recognize our marriage) was wrong. They said that I was giving up my blessings. I was furious and hurt. Eventually, I disengaged myself from them and told them they could “go hang it in their ears.” I ran upstairs and waited for Kody and Christine to return.

  Many of my other relatives, such as my maternal grandfather, never forgave me and did not speak to me again. Ov
er time, I’ve rebuilt many of these relationships, but those first years when I was new to the principle, losing my family really hurt. At least, I still had my mother for support. She was by my side at our family gatherings, which made me feel as if I was not entirely shunned.

  Normally, I would have turned to my career as an outlet to bolster my self-confidence. But when I married Kody, I’d been forced to quit my stable job in Utah and move to Wyoming—a small town with few employment opportunities. While I did manage to find a job, I felt that I had wandered far off course from my career goals.

  About six months after marrying Kody, I discovered that I was pregnant. Naturally, I was thrilled. I had something of my own, something that would, at least in part, make me feel as if I were an important member of the Brown family. Even though I hadn’t managed to figure out who I was and how I fit into the family I had joined, I was proud to be bringing the first child into our world.

  I knew that it would be uncomfortable telling Meri that I was pregnant. She had been unable to conceive after three years of marriage. However, I have to say that I didn’t care how she felt about my news. If it upset her, so be it. Things were incredibly tough in our relationship, so her feelings were of little importance to me at that moment.

  Kody, of course, was beyond excited at the thought of becoming a father. But our happiness did little to smooth over the tensions in the household. During my pregnancy, relations between Meri and me reached an all-time low. I was physically exhausted and sick, which weakened my ability to put up with Meri’s snide remarks and jabs. While she never overtly made me feel unwelcome in the house, I rarely ventured out into the rest of the home. I felt completely disenfranchised, even though I was carrying Kody’s child.

  Just before one of those trips when I was being left behind once more, my pregnancy hormones were making me feel especially vulnerable. Kody had taken a new job logging on a mountain, and I was upset to learn that he was again taking Meri with him. Meri took advantage of the situation to be exceptionally brutal. One of my friends and I had experimented with my makeup. As I was crying that I was being left behind, Meri began to ridicule the makeup I was wearing. This was the final straw after all the passive-aggressive behavior and snide remarks I had been dealing with for so many months. I completely lost it. I felt as if I was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. Kody was on his way out the door when I stopped him. There were tears running down my face.

  “I just need to know that you love me,” I said.

  A strange expression spread across Kody’s face. I felt as if he was going to laugh, not out of cruelty, but out of relief.

  “Of course I love you,” he said.

  “That’s all I needed to hear,” I told him.

  “That’s it?” Kody said. “That’s all I needed to say?”

  I managed to nod through my tears. The smallest things make the greatest difference. But we were all so young and we had taken on so much. Kody had a lot of learning to do. He was still a naive twenty-five-year-old. His father, his mother, Meri’s parents, and my mom were giving him advice from all sides. But ultimately, Kody would have to listen to himself and to his wives to achieve his own emotional maturity and understanding.

  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.