Sister Wives

by Brown, Kody;Brown, Meri

  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.

  Soon after I got my own house I made one of the most important decisions of my life—I went back to school and got a degree in accounting. Getting a degree changed my world. I didn’t realize how badly I’d wanted to do something like this. I felt personally and intellectually fulfilled. I was also certain that my career would thrive. This sense that I was taking control of my life and my future gave me invaluable self-confidence.

  While I was living on my own, I was in no way cut off from the family. After a while, Kody began staying at my house on our nights together. I was also determined that my children should not feel separated from their siblings. During the day I would drive them nearly thirty miles to Christine and Meri, who would provide day care and homeschooling. On the weekends, we would get together for family m
eals.

  Yet the separation did wonders for me. I was able to run my household as I wanted, not as my sister wives suggested. Before marrying Kody, I had always done the dishes in the morning, leaving my evenings free for relaxation. This habit—which in my mind is certainly not a bad one—drove my sister wives crazy. They insisted that I clean up at night, which irked me. Things like this may seem trivial, but over the years, small differences can really fester and come to stand for larger issues. But now, on my own, I didn’t have to worry about what anyone else thought. I could leave the dishes in the sink overnight as I liked. I could do things as they pleased me.

  In addition to being able to indulge my housekeeping habits, having my own place allowed me to focus on work and on school. And perhaps because I was so busy, I didn’t have time to think about the petty stuff that was the source of so many of my earlier grievances with Meri. We moved on. Meri, Christine, and I each had our own home. We had our own kitchens—always a major source of strife—and could live as we liked without interference or comment from the others.

  My happiness and my independence allowed Kody and me to enter a new phase in our relationship. I know it sounds silly to say, but after ten years of marriage, we finally had the time to get to know each other on a more spiritual and intimate level—and to enjoy our moments alone. We became parents so soon into our marriage that we rarely had time to ourselves. When we finally did, it was refreshing and reassuring. I felt that my marriage was stronger than ever.

  Two years after I’d established myself in my own house, Kody told me that he was moving the family to Utah. He had found a job for which he wouldn’t have to travel. He would be home with his kids every night.

  “Okay,” I told him. “See you later.”

  No way was I going to give up the peace and independence I had found. I had a great job. I had a great house. I wasn’t leaving, and most of all, I wasn’t going to live with my sister wives under one roof again. I worried about what would happen if we all lived together once more. I was stubborn. I stood my ground for almost a year. But soon I started to miss the family. And I knew that my children really missed living closer to their siblings.

  As I was coming to this realization, Kody told me something that completely changed my mind regarding the move to Utah. He had found a house—a big house with three separate apartments, each with its own living quarters—kitchen, living room, and bedrooms. The house had seven bathrooms! It was a polygamous family’s dream. This was all I needed to know. My kids could be reunited with their siblings on a permanent basis. I could be close to the family, yet still have my space.

  I was delighted by this development. I had been alone for months, and I could no longer deny that I was incredibly lonely. I missed my family. I missed the everyday interactions, the liveliness, and the chaos. The fact that we could all live together, yet maintain separate living quarters, felt like a dream come true. And it turned out to be just that.

  The big house changed everything. We were able to be together as a family in a natural and relaxed way. I had my own space, but my kids had their siblings and the other mothers in the same building. Most important, Kody was going to be home all the time. From the day Logan, our first child, was born, Kody has shown himself to be the best father any child could have hoped for. Now with the new house and his new job, he had the opportunity to see all of his kids on a daily basis. It was magical.

  The new phase that Kody and I had embarked upon when I moved into my own house only grew sweeter in the big house. I had been so overrun with kids, my job, and my schooling that I had never allowed myself to be emotionally vulnerable to him. Throughout the first years of our relationship—especially when I was feeling unsure of my place in the family—I was determined to prove my self-sufficiency.

  When I first met Kody, love was only about an intellectual connection and a friendship. I wanted a practical relationship that would provide a happy, stable environment for my children. That was enough for me. I am low maintenance when it comes to all things romantic. I prefer a good conversation and an afternoon spent together in a bookstore than all the hand-holding and sappy sweet talk in the world.

  Nevertheless, I have a husband who is unbelievably sensitive to my needs and wants. He is intimately engaged with his children. He is the most logical, loving parent I’ve ever seen. So I’d lucked into the most romantic thing I could have ever dreamed of—an ideal parent with whom I also have an intellectual connection.

  In the big house, I started to let down my guard and show Kody my more sensitive side. I felt confident in my place in the family, yet I had my own personal space. I have always been wary of being emotionally vulnerable. Because I’m afraid of being hurt, I throw up a wall and resist letting people in. In the big house, however, I found myself able to let him know when something was bothering me. I allowed myself to let him see when I was hurting and to help me if I needed it.

  Kody and I have forged a life together from a strange and distant beginning. We continue to evolve as a couple, exploring a more tender and romantic side of our relationship. In many ways, you could say our love story is just beginning.

  My relationship with Kody wasn’t the only relationship that benefited from our move into the big house. Once I finished school and rediscovered my self-esteem, I stopped taking others’ criticism of me so seriously. I had to learn that I wasn’t going to let anyone tell me how I should act, what I should do, or how I should behave. And once I stopped listening to everyone else’s voices in my head, I began to relax around my sister wives. We came to a mutual understanding and a collective respect for our similarities and differences.

  We’ve done so much growing up together. And like real sisters, we can look back on our collective struggles—our major arguments and silly squabbles—and if not laugh at them, at least shrug them off. Now we can’t even remember what half the fights were about. We’ve shared so much and been through a lot that with a word or a signal we can remind one another of an entire experience or story. We are bonded by our emotional history as well as our collective experiences.

  Our life together, however, is still a day-by-day process. Every day we all have to check our natural reactions to things and temper them. We have to be careful not to say things to one another in a hurtful manner. Every decision we make has to be grounded in what is best for the entire family as a whole. It’s complicated, but it’s worth it because we’ve created something rich and intricate. If I were to lose one of my sister wives or one of her children, I would feel as if I had lost a limb.

  Although Meri, Christine, and I are very different in our natures, we have grown to share the same values. The family we have now is an amalgam of each of our individual habits. We have all contributed something to the way our family runs. My sister wives have influenced the way I see the world, and I have done the same for them. Some of these changes are moral—we are, among our culture, considered fairly open-minded, almost liberal. And some of these changes are practical. For instance, if one of my sister wives prefers to feed her kids at seven and the other at five, we’ll adopt six as our dinnertime. By adapting to and adopting one another’s traits, we’ve developed our own culture.

  One of the things I had to work on once I moved into the big house with my sister wives was not falling into the pitfall of comparing my relationship with Kody to theirs. Comparison is the death of plural marriage. It leads to debilitating unhappiness. For instance, if I see that one of my sister wives has apples, my instinct is to say that I want apples, even if what I really want is oranges. I have to be true to myself and admit what I want and not simply want something because my sister wife has it. I can’t regress and say, “Kody, you love her more because you give her apples and I don’t have apples.” Our marriages are individual and we don’t want or need the same things. But awareness of what someone else has in her relationship can cause you to question yours. And this is where the danger lies. Kody is tender with us in different ways. He has different methods
of expressing his love. Maybe he leaves notes for one wife, sweet voice mails for another. Or maybe the way of showing his love is by always putting someone’s kids to bed. These differences are vital to our lives. They are what make each of our marriages unique and special.

  Somehow, after sixteen years, we had finally arrived at the ideal I’d envisioned when I’d accepted the principle. I was part of a happy, thriving family. We were able to make decisions as a group with a minimum of strife and bruised feelings. We had found our groove. I didn’t think that anything could disrupt our flow.

  I was fairly surprised when Kody came to me one afternoon and told me he was thinking about courting Robyn, but the way he handled it left me in awe of his emotional growth. He had learned so much from all the years with Meri, Christine, and me.

  When Kody began to court Robyn, it became clear to me that he finally empathized with the difficulty I’d had coming into the family. He showed that he’d learned from my struggles, and was very careful about how slowly he integrated Robyn into our lives. He allowed her ample time to get to know each wife and all of our children individually. When they were getting to know each other, before they’d been given permission to court, Kody would bring one of the wives or several of the children down to St. George in southern Utah to spend a weekend with Robyn. In doing so, he made sure Robyn felt as if she was going to be an important part of our family—and he also let the family know that they were still as important as they’d been before Robyn came into the picture. He was very protective of Robyn, so that when they eventually married, she would feel as if she already belonged in our midst.

  Kody and Robyn’s courtship coincided with a huge development in our lives. After careful consideration—and endless family discussions—we decided to participate in a reality TV show about our family. This decision wasn’t without complications. After all, there can be consequences when polygamists go public. But these unfamiliar waters certainly complicated Robyn’s entry into the family. It drew out her courtship with Kody and forced their wedding to be put off for a few extra months.