50 Years in Polygamy: Big Secrets and Little White Lies Page 17
So I finally came right out and said, “Mark, I’ve wanted you to buy me a diamond ring set for years! How about rings for our third wedding anniversary?”
With the large jar of change he’d been saving, and some postponed bills, he decided to purchase the rings. The engagement ring we picked out had a diamond in the center; the wedding band wrapped the center diamond on one side, with three tiny rubies between three tiny diamonds. It was absolutely gorgeous. When it was finally sized and ready, I looked like the weirdest woman on earth, prancing around staring at my finger day in and day out.
*****
After their conversion, a couple of single women who’d been active participants in LDS Church programs initiated “girls’ camp” in the Allred Group. They set it up similar to the LDS Church’s program.
I’d known for a while my cousin Kenneth’s daughter, Diane—Val’s younger sister—had a crush on Mark. I thought that was why she and her good friend Norma wanted to be in my camp. At girls’ camp we had a chance to get to know each other as more than just names. Everything we lost, forgot to pack, burned, or messed up only added excitement and new adventure. The pack of sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old fun-loving girls kept all of us rallied in fun. This kind of religious merriment had never been part of our younger years. Between the fun classes and great meals, we tubed down the river, jumped off a cliff into a cavern of deep, swirling water, and bathed behind shrubs and Indian grass in the river bend.
After camp and for several months, Diane came out to our house as often as she could. We enjoyed each other’s company, just as my mother had enjoyed time with her good friend Alice so many years before. I felt Diane genuinely liked me, and not just Mark. She was smart and had a great sense of humor, which was an additional appeal to our friendship. Mark and Diane liked many of the same things as well.
I knew he’d have to marry another woman some day so we could be with each other, our children and our families in the hereafter—after our bodies die and our spirits live on. My sister-wives might as well be women I can love and get along with, I thought. Even though I was still jealous about the whole thing, I truly felt good about Diane being part of our family.
As time passed, we saw less and less of Diane. I was sad Mark didn’t show more interest in her; I’m sure she sensed his distance and moved on.
*****
Mark found out a member of our group had been asked by the priesthood council to be a mechanic for the people who lived on the Pinesdale Ranch. The man was eager to fulfill his calling, so he was in a hurry to sell his land in Bluffdale, close to the Utah State Penitentiary. The two acres of land included a large, dilapidated old house the family used for extra bedrooms, since the kitchen plumbing was totally useless. Two huge chicken coops were full of cars, windows, motors, and more junk than the universe had stars. Two more slant-roofed coops in front of the other two had been converted into semi-functional apartments.
There were only two good things about moving clear out to Bluffdale. We’d have a piece of farmland where we could raise our kids outside the gloomy, crowded, ghetto atmosphere of Granger City. We could have horses, a huge garden, and more privacy. Those things definitely appealed to me. However, the reasons not to purchase the land far outweighed the positives. It was the early 1970s, and we would be moving into the middle of nowhere, with a massive junkyard where absolutely nothing was finished. I couldn’t see us ever having the time or money to make the necessary changes. Worse, was the land’s proximity to the Utah State Penitentiary. I worried none of us would be safe from the convicts who seemed to escape on a regular basis.
After the fact, I was elated Mark stuck to his guns and held fast to his best judgment. He talked me into the move with wonderful promises of how we’d improve the land and the buildings. Dad let Mark and I sell his house, which we’d been renting from him. We borrowed $12,000 from Dad’s equity, and purchased a quarter acre of grassland and one and three-quarter acres of junkyard.
In the fall of 1973, we moved into the better of the two slant-roofed, disheveled chicken-coop apartments—the same one the previous family had lived in.
The man of the house never had more than one wife, but many neighbors in the rural area presumed he had anywhere from three to ten. His wife wore her long hair wrapped around her head. Her dresses were ankle-length with long sleeves, and she openly advocated polygamy to anyone who would listen. By the time we moved out there, she’d already labeled us by association.
*****
Unlike my sister-in-law Val, my sister Amy, and the other “normal” young mothers I knew, I couldn’t get my boys to obey very well. I was sure all the mothers but me knew what they were doing when it came to parenting, so I tried to follow their advice.
“You should make your boys take a nap, Sophia,” my friends advised me. “It’s the only time you have to yourself to get things done. No wonder you feel so overwhelmed.”
In their tiny nine-by-ten-foot bedroom, Jake and Alan jumped up and down on their single bed. Listening to their precious laughter always tickled me inside and out. They got up a million times between my bouts of exasperation. As the time clicked by, the more swamped I felt. My work was demanding to be done, and soon nothing was funny anymore. I had to make them mind me—I had to get things right. My two- and three-year-old boys’ noncooperation, even with my angry threats and warnings, added fuel to my vexation. I’d already smacked their little behinds a few times. They must’ve thought I was crazy. When had I ever made them take naps before?
Before I knew it, I’d gone insane. Their terrified and pain-filled cries finally brought me to my senses. I saw the redness on my hand, the redness appearing on their legs where I’d missed their little bottoms as they tried to squirm away. I literally wanted to die.
I squeezed down between my bed and the wall and called my mother.
“Come over and take my boys away from me right now!” I demanded. “I don’t deserve them. Hurry! Please come get them now. I don’t want to hurt them ever again! I know they’ll be better off without me. I can’t stand me! I can’t live with what I have done! Come get them, Mom. As much as I love them, I don’t deserve to have them anymore.”
“No, Sophia, you’re wrong,” Mom shouted. “No one loves your boys like you do—no one ever will. You are a good mother! You do deserve them.”
My boys’ grandmother loved us as much as life. It took her quite some time to calm me. But Mom was right. I loved my boys more than myself, more than anything or anyone. I couldn’t understand why I’d behaved so despicably and gotten so enraged. Where had it come from? What if it came back?
Months later, while Francine was driving me home across miles of winding, bumpy, dirt roads from the west desert, I unburdened a truckload of guilt. “Nearly every day to this very day,” I told her, “I have mourned hitting my boys so hard. What will happen if I ever get out of control again? What in God’s name came over me? How could I have ever done that to my precious boys?”
“You did it because you learned it from our mother,” Francine matter-of-factly stated.
“Why would you say such mean, idiotic things about our mother?”
“Because it’s true! Abuse can pass on from one generation to the next. If you don’t stop it now, your kids will carry it on to theirs, and so on and so on. Mom did to us what her father had done to his children and what his mother had done to them, for who knows how many generations. It’s not your fault, Sophia. In the depths of her self-loathing and turmoil, our mother beat on all of us kids, including you. That’s what you grew up with, and what you learned.”
Tears burned my eyes.
“Mom didn’t beat on me, Francine. She didn’t hit me like I hit Jake and Alan. She yelled and screamed at us, and I remember her pulling my hair and smacking me once in a while, but she didn’t—”
“Yes, she did!” Francine yelled. Then she started crying and pulled off the road. “I was there, Sophia! I was outside the door. You weren’t more than f
our years old. I could hear each snap of the belt on your little body in between Mom’s scolding. I pounded on the door and screamed and begged her to stop. It seemed like forever! When I could no longer hear your screams and crying, I thought you might be dead. All I could hear was Mom wailing. When I finally got the door opened with a butter knife, Mom was holding you in her arms. She seemed catatonic, and her moaning nearly covered up your whimpers. She rocked you back and forth, back and forth in her arms.”
I thought I’d suffocate from the pain of envisioning that story, let alone being the child victim. Francine slid over and held me. Together, we wept aloud as we rocked in each other’s arms for a long time.
No wonder anger terrified me as much as suffocation and torture might. I had been there. And I never wanted to go there again.
*****
We’d lived in Bluffdale nearly six months. I was still frightened of the prisoners who might break out and come to our junkyard to hide. Even at my old age of twenty-one, I hadn’t gotten over my fear of going outside alone if it was dark.
One ominously cloudy day while I was alone with Jake and Alan, I heard a loud pounding on the door. I was so startled I nearly wet my pants. The three of us peeked out of our window. All we could see was the legs of a very tall man—more like a giant man. He was standing one step above the platform where our door opened and shut. Again, he banged on the door, harder and louder.
“Are those your damn dogs?” he bellowed as soon as I cracked the door open.
His six-foot-four stature, plus the eight-inch step above our door, made the barrel end of the shotgun he was holding even with my eyes. “Uh . . . uh . . . what?” I stammered.
“Listen, lady!” he yelled. “I’ve got sheep and cows over there in my field, and I’m damned—excuse my language—I’m tired of your dogs and all the other damn dogs in the neighborhood chasing and killing my damn sheep! So if you don’t want some dead dogs, you’d better keep them locked up! You hear me? Okay?”
I bobbed my head up and down; feeling a little less scared knowing his wrath was about our dogs, not my little boys and me. Within seconds, the man’s voice sounded like another man’s.
“Hey, I’m sorry to be yelling at you, lady. I’m Leonard Swenson. You can call me Swede. You’re the new neighbors we heard about, I guess. I’m glad to meet you. My wife hasn’t been feeling very good so she’s not very friendly, but you and your husband and the kids are welcome to come over any time you want. Get yourselves over for coffee and a good visit. Do you like playing cards? We’ll play some poker sometime, and then we can chop the heads off those squalling turkeys and chickens of ours and cook them for supper, all right?”
“Thank you, Mr. Swenson,” I said with a very relieved grin on my face.
“Well, shit, little lady.” He stopped. “Guess it won’t do to keep apologizing for my bad language. I’m sure it won’t end after all these years. Anyway, I was telling you, don’t call me Mr. Swenson—I’m Swede to you and to everyone else around here. Oh hell, I forgot to ask you what your name is.”
I introduced my precious boys and myself. Then Swede invited them over for a piece of candy any time they wanted one.
CHAPTER 18
Birth Control and
Girls’ Camp Anxiety
1973–1974
Birth control is the subject of many a religious debate. As with every doctrine, the rules change or vary depending on who is dispensing them or deciphering them. Opinions stretch to both ends of the spectrum. On one end, following God’s laws to the T meant you live the “law of Chastity,” where the only justification for intercourse is procreation. Many believe the most pure and special spirits come to those who abide by this law.
The extreme necessitated no birth control whatsoever. A married couple was to let nature take its course, and the frequent pregnancies were because one should have as many children as God wanted to send. Either way you looked at it, the main consensus, as I understood it among most Fundamentalist’s, was (and is still), any manner of birth control other than abstinence is not acceptable to God.
In private, Dad told me, and probably his other daughters, not to have any more children than we could care for physically and emotionally. We should make sure each of them was planned and conceived in love. Yet, the amount of children a woman gives her husband to help build his kingdom, determines her value in the grand scheme of things. If we weren’t strong-willed and righteous enough to use abstinence as our birth control method, we had to figure out other ways to make sure we didn’t have unwanted pregnancies. Then all we had to deal with was the guilt about having sex other than for pro-creation, guilt about using another method of birth control, and God not sending us His most prized spirits.
My dad said he could not preach those things over the pulpit. He didn’t want to get blackballed for teaching what many Fundamentalists would say was blasphemy.
“Too many of our people,” Dad told me, “think God wants them to have a child every year, whether they can handle them or not. I wish they understood God expects quality before quantity.”
I believed my father was truly a wise man about those things. He’d always taught us values that seemed wise, even though I sometimes had a hard time with them. Didn’t God create humans to crave sex? Yet if He had His way, we wouldn’t have sex unless it was to have a baby? Good grief, we’d already have to be gods or goddesses to make that happen! What if I couldn’t “emotionally” handle more than my two boys—did that mean I should never have sex again? To me, it meant I wasn’t as valuable as the women who could handle a dozen or more children—only having sex a dozen or so times. Yeah, right! Abstinence probably works for women who don’t enjoy sex, or who feel guilty if they have a passionate relationship with their husbands.
There was always something to feel guilty about. It wasn’t a righteous option to enjoy the powerful connection our lovemaking had come to provide. Mark and I knew we weren’t, and probably never would be, strong enough to live the “law of chastity.” The best we could do was to opt for the lesser of those evils. We would plan the conceptions of the rest of our children, use birth control, and have to live with the ongoing consequence—guilt galore.
*****
One of my constant worries was Mark’s aversion to attending meetings. As time went on, he spent less time at our meetinghouse. He had a list of reasons. Both of us despised Jon and Gregory, who were council members. Mark was critical of most of the men who were on the priesthood council.
Mark said he never felt welcome at church. “Your dad never did like me because I came from a family of Independent polygamists. I’ve never been good enough for his daughter.”
“It’s because you behave like an Independent polygamist,” I’d argue. “You act like a law unto yourself, without priesthood leadership. If we’re going to live the gospel, it should be lived the right way or not at all. We should live the lower laws first. We should attend meetings, pay our tithing, keep the Word of Wisdom, and have daily family prayer. If we can’t even abide by the lower laws of God, how can we ever qualify or be worthy to live the higher law of plural marriage? If we’d do those things together, Dad would notice you are part of The Group and he wouldn’t be so concerned about our eternal welfare.”
“I have my own dad. He’s my leader,” Mark replied. “He still has the priesthood, even if your dad doesn’t think so. I won’t kiss your dad’s ass, Sophia. If he can’t see what kind of man I am without me following his rules, then he can shove it!”
I grieved about these issues consistently. They were exactly the things my father said he was worried about before I married Mark. A few months after he gave us permission to marry, my dad told me I would probably have to be the spiritual leader of our household.
As I already learned from dating Royce, most Independents were opposed to any kind of organized gathering. He said Lorin C. Woolley, one of our original prophets, believed and advocated Fundamentalist polygamists were not to organize or gather as a chu
rch. We were to carry out the covenant of plural marriage only. That’s why most Independents claim no accountability to any religious leader or edict other than to live polygamy, and multiply and replenish the earth.
I remember asking Dad about those concerns, and he agreed. As usual, he asserted “valid” reasons why our latter-day prophets could change Woolley’s rules and opinions. Needless to say, I went along with my family’s opinions.
At church, I was embarrassed. I didn’t want my family, relatives, or friends to know the real reasons Mark was inactive. Week after week I made more excuses for his absence. Once in a while he’d concede and attend meetings. Meanwhile, I hoped everyone would believe the good reasons I had for his not being an active member of The Group.
*****
In 1974, the economy and construction businesses were booming. Every time I saw one of Mark’s finished masonry jobs, which were scattered across Salt Lake and Utah counties, I was proud. Anyone with an eye for quality could appreciate the artistry and perfection of the projects designed and completed by Mark and his crew of masons.
He and I borrowed $26,000 to build a home right in front of our chicken-coop apartment. It would be located where the old, run-down house was before Francine’s husband bulldozed it and hauled most of it away. We chose a floor plan from Mark’s boss, my cousin Kenneth, and planned to start building in a few months. It was so hard to imagine or believe such an incredible blessing could be ours.
*****
Diane’s fifteen-year-old friend, Norma, lived close by. We asked her to watch Jake and Alan now and then. Over time, she and Mark developed an obvious crush on each other. She was darling, cute, and fun. Maybe she would make a nice addition to our family, I told myself. I know we have to live polygamy some day and I’d better make myself give in. Everyone else our age was expanding their families. We needed to move on as well. I certainly didn’t want to be left out in the cold.