Sister Wives

by Brown, Kody;Brown, Meri

  Although I lived in my own house when I married Kody, I still became part of the Brown family in every way—I helped out with all the kids and contributed my paycheck to the family to help pay all the bills. This cooperative living was new for me; as a single working mom, it was usually up to me to make things work financially. Money was tight, but knowing that we had one another’s backs was wonderful.

  Since moving to Nevada, things have changed a lot for us and made us more of a team. We all had to contribute to the expenses to relocate our family, which was difficult for each of us. But now that we have a television show, we are essentially working together as a family on a daily basis and we are a team financially. We split all of our money evenly and help each other out. This has unified us and evened out any sense of financial inferiority or instability any of us may have had previously. We are all equal.

  Obviously, in addition to bringing a greater sense of financial equality between us, the show has been beneficial in allowing us to openly attend all of the children’s school activities. The adults know that all the kids love to have any, if not all, of the parents at their recitals, performances, sporting events, and assemblies. If I could, I would go to every school event! Unfortunately, with so many children, this simply isn’t possible. Each week, all the moms and the kids let the family know about what school events are happening and we try to figure out a way for the most parents to attend the most events. When my son Dayton graduated from elementary school, I invited all the parents. To my surprise and delight, they all came. Christine got there first and texted the rest of us, letting us know where the assembly was and that she was saving seats. When we all sat down and Dayton saw us, he starting waving. Sitting in the audience, I was overwhelmed with pride in both my son and my family.

  One of the benefits of being in a plural family is that when I simply cannot attend one of my kids’ events, I know that my sister wives and Kody will give my children support I would have had I been there. Sadly, Kody and I had to be out of town when Dayton was a in a school play. I knew how upset Dayton would be if no one from the family was there—he was so excited to be in the production. When I asked the other moms to support him, I was thrilled that Christine and Meri were able to go. Meri even filmed the performance so I could watch it later. Dayton was over the moon that his other moms were there. And I was so happy to be able to watch the play when I returned from my trip.

  Being part of the Brown family is exciting and surprising for the kids and me. I love that my kids have a ton of siblings around all the time. The other kids are often at my house searching for food. This is a common habit of all Brown kids—looking for snacks in the other houses. I specifically save leftovers for such raids. I always try to have ice cream and Popsicles in my freezer so the kids won’t waste money on the ice cream truck. Even if there isn’t ice cream, there’s usually something worth foraging for in my cabinets since food has a tendency to last longer at my house. My girls and I don’t eat a lot. I struggle to have an appetite. But Breanna and I are both hypoglycemic, which means we always need to have emergency snacks on hand so that if we experience a blood sugar crash, we can survive.

  Aside from our Friday night dinner and Sunday potluck, we don’t get together as a family for meals and we don’t grocery shop together unless it’s an impromptu event. We will coordinate our big family meals for holidays and birthdays by communicating who is responsible for bringing what. Birthdays are usually hosted by the mother of the child whose birthday it is. That mom will cook what she or her child likes best. However, sometimes kids will request a dish from one of the other mothers’ repertoires. Last year Janelle’s son Gabe requested Meri’s mashed potatoes and gravy for his birthday, and Meri was happy to provide them. I’ll feel pretty special when the kids request one of my recipes for their birthday meal.

  Our kids spend as much time together as possible. The only rules I impose on this is that visiting children can’t interfere with my children’s homework, nor can my kids go out until their homework or chores are complete. Other than that, as long as I know where my children are planning to hang out and how they are getting there and back, I’m happy to have them be with their siblings whenever they want.

  The younger girls tend to congregate at my house. Kody calls the five younger girls (not including Truely, who’s still a baby) “The Pixies,” so my house is sort of the “Pixie House.” The girls range from six to ten years old and they all play together often. They play dolls, house, do crafts, and anything that fits into their fantasies. They also love sleeping over at my house. I get bombarded every weekend for sleepovers and I get complaints if at least one sleepover doesn’t happen per week!

  The only time I will assert myself with children who are not my own is when there aren’t other parents around. Without the other moms present, I’m comfortable correcting other children’s behavior and enforcing my own rules. However, I tend not to do any child rearing with the other children, especially if other moms are present. I don’t feel that it is my place to interfere with how someone else raises her children. For this reason, I haven’t had a lot of child-rearing conflicts with my sister wives.

  While I’m usually comfortable with one of my sister wives helping to parent my children, when we’re all together or at another mom’s house, I try to make sure I am the one who keeps my kids in line, so another mom doesn’t feel like she has to take charge. I feel like I am slacking if I don’t take care of things myself and attend to my own children, so I’m very aware of what my kids are doing when we are in another house. When I’m not there and my kids are visiting alone, I encourage the other moms to inform me if my kids are behaving in a way that I should correct.

  Despite the fact that all of our parenting styles are different, each sister wife has the best interest of the kids at heart. I’m more prone to talking things out. I want to learn about the kids’ feelings and try to understand why they are acting out in a certain way before punishing them for their behavior. I know that I am over-protective and overly gentle. I stand up for the underdog. For example, Mykelti, Christine’s second oldest daughter, is a very unique girl. She doesn’t fit in very well with the three older teen girls. She is creative and independent, so she gets razzed a lot. I have a tendency to stand up for her and see the best in her. She will do something great someday with her out-of-the-box thinking.

  I don’t tolerate bullying and harassing from any of the kids. Even minor teasing is off-limits. I want all the children to be nice to one another always. For this reason, I prefer a calmer more peaceful home environment. I try to bring a sense of respect to every family gathering and every situation in which I’m dealing with a group of kids. I expect the kids to be responsible and considerate, so I try to lead by example.

  I ran into a few issues with my position as a parent with some of the older kids when I first came into the family. I don’t think they were ready to accept me as a mom—it was strange for them to all of a sudden have someone new parent them without any history. We have had some issues with some of the kids because of this; I think every blended family deals with similar problems. I thought, at first, that my sister wives would just insist that their kids look at me as a mom, but I’ve realized that it is up to me to claim that role. I have actually had to reach out to the kids and build a relationship with them independent of their biological moms. Respect is earned, not demanded—my parental relationships are getting better and better with time, but it’s still a work in progress.

  I think opening the lines of communication about our children is important to our growth as a family. We have a lot of kids who are all going through different stages in life. It’s essential to stay on top of their development and difficulties. Since my children are the youngest of our brood, I haven’t yet had to deal with the question of teen dating. That will happen too soon, I’m afraid. My son, Dayton, is hitting puberty and is almost as tall as me! However, I will happily give my input as to what I think is appropriate so that we can set
some family ground rules and our kids will all be on the same page as to what is allowed. I have life experiences that I can share with the kids to help them make informed decisions and I don’t mind doing so. Nevertheless, I feel that it is ultimately up to Kody and the other moms to enforce the rules for their specific children.

  My children are so blessed to have all these mommies and the best daddy ever. Kody is such a great father, even though he is stretched so thin. He makes time count! I know my kids have felt the lack of having a good daddy in their life. I remember long before I ever met Kody, my kids would ask when they were going to get their new dad. I think Dayton, especially, has benefited so much from having a guy around. Kody is so patient with him and loves to spend time letting him rattle on about his latest fascination. My girls, Aurora and Breanna, adore Kody as well. Daddy’s kisses and hugs are welcome and wanted. He is so cute with them. It makes me love him that much more. It really is true that the way to a divorced mom’s heart is through her kids!

  I’m sure sometimes the kids get sick of having so many adults commenting on their lives. But mostly the kids adore having five adults who love them—not to mention a lot of brothers and sisters who do as well. Our children are never alone and this gives them a strong identity and a permanent sense of place. These kids will never lack in support and love. Of course, being part of such a large family is as demanding of them as it is of the adults. The most difficult thing for our children is that they never get to be selfish and cannot put their individual needs in front of their siblings’. I know my kids have had to adjust to sharing with more brothers and sisters. My girls now have several other sisters to incorporate in their play, whether they like it or not. Recently one of the other pixies needed a chapter book to read and my daughter Aurora has several. I asked her to share with her sister. Aurora struggled at first with lending out her book, so I had to point out that we are a family and we share and we help each other out. This family is always a team. It can be a challenge to them to always remember that. Then again, it can be a challenge for the adults as well. But we are getting there.

  Chapter Thirteen

  MERI

  I have always been very private about my polygamous lifestyle. Growing up, I went to a school run by our church, which meant that during my childhood, I had few friends outside my faith. As I grew older, I met more people from outside my religious community, but I was still quite guarded about my family’s beliefs. I kept my friends at a distance and didn’t open up to them about my father and his wives. I always offered to hang out with my friends at their houses and never invited them home with me.

  I kept my beliefs a secret because I wanted to be accepted as a “normal” person, whatever that means. Essentially, I didn’t want to be stereotyped. I wanted my friends to accept me for me and not reject me based on my faith.

  After I married Kody—who is so naturally outgoing—I still kept my lifestyle to myself. It wasn’t something I was comfortable sharing. I worried about how my friends would react when I came out to them as a polygamist. I didn’t want to invite unneeded scrutiny. I didn’t want to be judged. Since polygamy is not just frowned upon, but denigrated, you never know how someone will react when you tell him or her the truth about your beliefs. You never know when you are going to lose a close friend. For years it just seemed better to stay quiet.

  After Janelle and Christine joined the family, we would explain each other away as sisters, or as Kody’s sisters. It was always so uncomfortable to lie to my friends. Lying is not part of our faith, nor part of my own moral compass, so to feel as if I had to lie, or at least not tell the full truth, was quite difficult for me.

  Unfortunately, we felt that keeping the truth hidden about our family was a necessity. Growing up, I heard many stories of fathers in polygamous families who were sent to jail for their beliefs. I heard about children taken from their families and wives sent to live in different states, in an attempt to preserve the spiritual family structure. Once Kody, Janelle, Christine, and I had kids, we didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize our family. We needed to stay together even if it meant hiding the truth about our lifestyle. Nothing was going to split up our family.

  A lot of polygamists prefer to live in smaller, closed communities where nearly all the residents are of the same faith. These communities, which are actually fully functional towns, have businesses and stores, and some even have their own zip codes. There is a school and of course a church. Since everyone shares the same beliefs, it’s simple to be open about the polygamous lifestyle.

  I’ve never lived in a community like this, either before or since my marriage. For years we hid in plain sight. It is a testament to how—and I hesitate to use the word—normal we are, that not many people suspected there was anything different about our family. We worked. We had friends outside our faith. We participated in civic life. For many years, I tried not to technically “lie.” I always tried to answer questions in a way that might make me feel not so guilty, but I was still not being honest. This is a hard game to play. You always have to remember who you told what to. It was always difficult for me to deny the truth about myself and my family. Lying about our lifestyle transformed something we believed to be beautiful and sacred into a dirty little secret, something that people might think I was ashamed of. It was exhausting and frustrating.

  The year before we decided to participate in Sister Wives, a very good friend of mine, with whom I’d worked for a few years, invited me to his wedding. Scott and his fiancée, who were both LDS, were planning to get married in the Mormon temple. In the LDS faith, the temple is a very sacred place, and the only people who enter are devout members of the faith who follow specific guidelines. Since we are not members of the LDS faith, the temple would be off-limits to us. Kody and I would be unable to witness the ceremony.

  Since there is considerable overlap of beliefs between my faith and the LDS faith, Scott always assumed that I was a conventional Mormon, and I never bothered to correct him. Naturally, when he invited Kody and me to the wedding, he never imagined he was breaking a fundamental rule of his faith. Kody had been suggesting for quite some time that I open up to Scott about my family and my faith. I was too concerned about losing a friend, so I just wasn’t willing to do it. I told Kody I was just going to make an excuse to Scott and say we couldn’t make it. Because Scott and I had been such good friends, Kody felt that Scott deserved to know the truth about why we couldn’t attend his wedding, not just blowing him off saying we couldn’t make it. He was very emphatic now that we needed to tell Scott the truth.

  Kody and I arranged a dinner with Scott and his fiancée. I was really nervous. I had no idea how Scott would react. My worries were twofold. On the one hand, I was worried that Scott would reject me for my beliefs, and on the other, I was worried he would be angry that I’d lied to him for so long.

  Over dinner, Kody managed to steer the conversation around to how Scott and his wife met. After he heard their story, he shared ours. Kody told them that when he returned from his LDS mission, he fell in love with a woman whose father had five wives. It took Scott a moment to realize that Kody was talking about me. Once Scott caught on, we explained that we had embraced my father’s faith as well and were practicing members of the faith, with a much larger family than Scott had ever imagined.

  When Kody and I were done speaking, Scott was silent for a moment. Then he began to apologize. He apologized for putting me in such a difficult position by inviting me to a wedding I couldn’t attend. He apologized if at any time during our friendship he might have made a remark about polygamy that was insensitive. I thought it said so much about Scott’s character to be the one apologizing, when I was the one who really needed to apologize to him for not being honest about who I really was.

  Even though we couldn’t attend the ceremony in the temple, we still went to Scott’s wedding reception. I felt honored that Scott had considered me such a close friend that he would invite us to his temple wedding, and
I was so relieved that our friendship was still intact after opening up about my family and our beliefs. Since then, Scott and his wife have met and accepted our entire family, and even once appeared briefly on an episode of Sister Wives.

  Incidents like this were frequent in our lives. I think our entire family was starting to feel that in order to live our lives to the fullest, we needed to make some changes.

  Kody is a dreamer, which is one of the qualities I love about him. He tends to reach for the stars and in so doing, can come up with some pretty amazing ideas. During our twenty-two years together, I’ve learned to listen to his ideas and realize that while some are great and we can make them happen, some can be less than realistic, and we need to allow them to fall by the wayside.

  Kody had talked for more than a year about wanting to do something to show that plural marriage can be so much more than what was usually portrayed in the media—but it took some time to figure out just how to do that. When we met Tim Gibbons, our producer, and the idea of doing a television program was introduced to us, Kody got on board with the idea long before I did. When he told me he was interested in doing a reality program about our family, I just shook my head and let it slide. After all, I assumed this was another one of those plans that he would eventually drop.

  I was wrong. Kody did not drop the idea. In fact, he became more and more drawn to it. Soon his discussions of doing a television program went from abstract to serious. Kody felt that he was truly called to the cause.

  As our family has grown, so has the time we’ve devoted to family discussions—decisions about money, schooling, and our living situation. As Kody realized more and more the importance of doing the show, and the calling he felt to it, these discussions became more frequent and more urgent. We spent hours running through the pros and cons of going public.