LITMIR.BIZ

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God’s message to him. Following church teachings at the time, my father returned to Salt Lake City and began to pray about his revelation. To his amazement, a few months after he arrived back in Salt Lake, Audrey told him about her own revelation. She had dreamt that a woman named Sharon Steed belonged to their family, and she asked Dad if he knew who she was. Up until this point, my father hadn’t told anyone about his revelation, so hearing this from Audrey was a surprise. That day, he told her about Sharon and they began to pray together.

      More than a year passed and nothing happened. Soon afterward, Dad heard that Sharon was going to be placed with another man. Disappointed and worried that he had misunderstood the revelation, he confided in Audrey’s brother, who suggested that Dad speak to the man who was then the head of the church—the prophet Leroy S. Johnson, commonly referred to as “Uncle Roy.” (In the FLDS religion, the term “uncle” is commonly used to refer to the patriarchs and presiding leaders and conveys endearment and respect.) During his conversation with Uncle Roy, Dad learned that there was no marriage planned for Sharon, and the prophet directed him to go home and pray so that Uncle Roy could “take it up with the Lord.”

      When it comes to marriage, members practice something called the Law of Placement, in which all marriages are decided by the prophet and based on a revelation that he receives from God. Everything the prophet proclaims is said to be the word of God, and thus if he directs a union, it is akin to God commanding the union.

      Several weeks after his conversation with Uncle Roy, during one of Dad and Audrey’s visits to southern Utah, the revelatory word came from the prophet. At the direction of Uncle Roy, Dad and Audrey drove to the home where my mom lived with her family to make an introduction. Mom was in the living room when they arrived, and not knowing what was about to take place, she rose to leave when her father instructed her to stay and meet her husband-to-be. My mother had already been told of the prophet’s placement for her, but when nothing immediately happened she worried she would not be married because traditionally, marriages are “sealed” by the prophet within days, and sometimes hours, of a revelation.

      My parents were married that very same day. With no time to sew a wedding dress, Mom made do by wearing her favorite pale pink dress for the ceremony. That night, she was on her way to Salt Lake City to start a new life with my father and Mother Audrey in their six-bedroom house on the “benches” of the Wasatch Mountains.

      This would be one of the first nights my mother had ever spent away from her large family. Though it was a difficult and sudden change, her steadfast faith allowed her to see it as positive. The union represented an important milestone: the prophet had found a place where she could start to build a new family. More than anything, Mom was thankful to have been placed.

      My mother came of age during a time when the local authorities in southern Utah and northern Arizona were very committed to ending plural marriages. For a time, her father, my Grandpa Newel, had become a target of routine raids, with police turning up unannounced at his ranch in hopes of finding plural wives. As a result, much of her childhood was spent hiding her family’s polygamous living arrangement from authorities and moving between Utah and Arizona to evade detection and capture. In an effort to avoid arrest and possible imprisonment, Grandpa Newel had begun stashing the women and children in various locations around the region. My mother was sent to live in a home near the Arizona border, where some of her siblings could attend school. However, authorities somehow learned of their location, and an anonymous call was placed to my biological grandmother, Alice, alerting her to their knowledge and offering friendship and a way out. Much to the astonishment of law enforcement, none of Grandpa’s wives were unhappy or seeking help. In fact, all five of his wives wanted little more than to be left in peace to live out their lives according to their religious teachings and beliefs. It has often been said that Grandpa Newel and his family were a model to be followed by all.

      As traumatic as the moving around and evading authorities might seem, it only made my mother’s faith more entrenched. She firmly believed in the traditions of plural marriage and the teachings of the church, and her positive experience growing up shaped every part of her outlook. Whenever she spoke of her childhood, her voice resonated with affection—even when she spoke of the family’s persecution. Nostalgic stories of living on her father’s ranch would mix with dramatic scenes of evading capture, leaving me scared and imparting the clear lesson that all strangers—especially the police—were not to be trusted. One story in particular about my mother and her young siblings crawling through a hole in the backyard fence of their “safe house” near the Arizona border to escape the authorities always sent my stomach lurching. I would sit there listening and imagining how terrified she must have been, a little girl out there in the dead of night squeezing through a fence to escape the officers who’d come to round up her family. Mom used stories like this one to deepen the faith of her own children, and to help us to understand why it was so important to keep our lifestyle hidden from outsiders—particularly outside law-enforcement officials.

      At the time of her wedding, Mom was only eighteen years old, while Audrey was thirty-three. Despite their age difference, Audrey eagerly anticipated the addition of another wife to the family, thinking that she would have a confidante and a friend. However, it was soon apparent that the different ways in which the two women had been raised made it difficult for them to understand and appreciate each other. Although Audrey’s parents were converts to the FLDS religion, Audrey herself had grown up in a monogamous house hold. When my mother became the second wife, it was the first time that Audrey had ever experienced a plural marriage firsthand.

      Understandably, having a much younger woman come into her home and share her husband’s love brought up strong feelings of resentment and deep jealousy for Audrey. She was Dad’s first wife and first love. She had established a home and family with my father and had been his mate for nearly fifteen years before my mother arrived. My mother was talented and beautiful and had youth on her side. She could cook and sew and was very artistic with a gift for painting that she inherited from my grandmother. Sharon was known for her lovely singing voice and vibrant personality. With soft brown eyes that revealed the kindness in her soul, she appeared to captivate my father. That my mother was brought into the family by a revelation from God only seemed to make her union with Dad more significant and intimidating to Audrey.

      There were also practical issues. Audrey had always played an integral role in the family’s financial planning and had a clear idea of how money should be spent. It seemed that in Audrey’s opinion, Mom had left her home a child and had no experience with budgeting for a family.

      My mother, in turn, had her own feelings of inadequacy. Audrey had a long-established, strong relationship with my dad; she’d borne his children and knew his wants and desires. As first wife, Audrey had primacy, which elevated her in the eyes of my father and gave her authority. Later I realized Mom saw Audrey’s concerns over the house hold budget as demeaning and felt she was trying to monitor her spending. Mom had never had money be such a contentious element in her life. Growing up on a self-sustaining farm, money didn’t have the same kind of relevance. Her family had little but made do, living frugally. Still, everyone was content and provided for. In Salt Lake, Mom tended a garden in our backyard, and harvested fruit and vegetables for the family. She was unaccustomed to having to provide reasons for items she felt she needed to care for herself and her children. It was even harder when the questions were coming from a sister wife.

      As the years went on and their families grew, these problems and insecurities did not fade away, but only amplified. Even after my mother began to have kids of her own, the two women were often at odds over everything from raising children to the affections of their husband. Each woman suffered doubts about the house hold as she tried to practice her individual parenting style and run a house full to the brim with children. To make matters worse, each mother felt that the other’s children were being treated better than her own. Frequently, communication between Mom and Mother Audrey was strained with my mother taking the onslaught to prevent further conflict. Neither had total authority over the house hold, and both seemed to feel somehow robbed of the chance to be in charge of their own home.

      Growing up, I always heard differing sides to the story, and blame for the problems in the family was always being passed around. By the time I came along, my brothers and sisters

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