50 Years in Polygamy: Big Secrets and Little White Lies Read online

  In a few months, he quit his steady job as a butcher, filed for unemployment, and moved to Utah. Though I never wanted to marry again, we married in January so he could have the medical insurance he needed. We had a quiet, simple wedding. The only two guests were my sisters, Amy and Jolie, who served as our witnesses.

  About three weeks later, Bart’s other personality revealed its ugliness. One night he turned his back to me and refused to talk. When I asked, “What’s wrong? Please talk to me,” one too many times, Bart exploded. He leaned his large, intimidating body over me and yelled, “Don’t ask me what’s wrong ever again!” He snatched the comforter off the bed and slammed himself down on my old couch, where he brooded and seethed for five days and nights.

  I knew Bart’s anger was conjured—I’d done nothing to justify his behavior. My brother and I had been laughing on the phone about the cute things our grandchildren say and do. A whole week later, Bart finally confessed that he’d determined an old boyfriend was on the other end of the line.

  Nearly a month later, Bart went on another tangent. I went bonkers. My anger wasn’t directed at him as much as it was at me. I despised myself for being with him. I should have known better! Outside of my apartment I sprinted, walked, and then jogged in a four-hour reckless craze. In another temporary state of insanity, I didn’t give a rat’s ass if a madman hauled me off to the desert and killed me. I must truly be a despicable, worthless piece of cow dung to have fallen into another abusive situation, I thought. How stupid could I be? Where did I go wrong? I must have been completely blind to my soul’s warning signs.

  At some point, after several unrestrained break-away hours, I stopped in the middle of a parking lot and called Mark. I screamed out my sorrows—about his betrayal and disloyalty to Diane and me, and to our children; about his absence in our lives and his choices to keep Norma in his life at our expense; about his neglect of the bills, child support, and house payments; about his, Jared’s, and Norma’s ongoing lies to Diane and our children. All of my purging gave me the strength to turn around and face life; and I didn’t hear Mark say one word.

  My legs could barely move. I had no idea why I married Bart. The only assurance I had from my soul that day, on my humble, four-hour journey back, was my relationship with him was also part of my soul’s plan of progression—it was meant to be. I knew my marriage wouldn’t last long, but I was to give it my very best, and I’d know exactly when I was through.

  Those were the first of Bart’s relentless bipolar behaviors. While in his manic highs, he treated me and others well. In his once-a-month-or-more depressive lows, he’d conjure up something I’d supposedly done or not done, and then spend the next four to seven days treating me like refuse.

  Sure enough, as more time passed, I was slowly but surely taking back my power. Bart delighted in his irrational outbursts and long bouts of passive-aggressive cruelty; the ones he used to make me cry or fight with him. He was so miserable that he insisted I should be also. The stronger I got, the worse he behaved. His idiotic, drunken attempts to seduce women, his attempt to kill both of us while driving in a winter storm, his constant delusions of injustices, and his complete refusal to take responsibility for his outlandish behaviors—all in all, I was becoming even more calm and secure. His self-destruct modes could no longer bring me down, and he couldn’t manipulate me into joining his battlefield. I refused to let him guilt me into not dancing anymore, or into neglecting my friends and family to hold his hand while he took pleasure in his never-ending bouts of depression.

  From the beginning to the end, I separated myself from Bart at least six times. In August 2006, two and a half years after we were married, I moved away from him for the last time.

  In the evenings after teaching school all day, or on weekends, I’d hang out with friends or family until I wanted or needed to go home. In my small office/bedroom space at the other end of the house, I’d write, read, plan lessons, and create. The powerful energy in my quiet cave was exhilarating. My mind and soul were reconciling. My insatiable need to be heard, believed, right, adored, and to help or fix him or others was coming to a close. The war within me was ending. Once again, I was honoring and loving Kristyn. Tranquility began to replace the tornados in my life, and self-respect started to fill the empty places in my heart.

  I’d been teaching for two years at Rosamond Elementary and still wasn’t sure of our lunch cooks’ names. A few months after school started again, a loud voice (my soul) clearly told me I needed to “get to know Jody this year.” In the early morning, I started taking time to have coffee and visit with her team in the kitchen, before I went to my classroom. In January 2007, she said she’d like me to meet her dad. I stretched my arms straight out in front of me, crossed my two index fingers in an X, and exclaimed, “No way! I don’t ever want or need another man in my life. But thank you anyway.”

  Jody wouldn’t take no for an answer. For five months she tried to persuade me. I later learned she was working on her dad as well. “All I’m asking you to do is have coffee together,” she said to me. “You don’t have to get married!” One night my soul adamantly told me twice, “You need to meet this man.”

  One morning when her dad called her, Jody asked him to deliver her Mother’s Day card to her at school at the same time she knew I’d be there. When I stepped into the kitchen, I watched and waited. Soon, Jody interrupted her father to introduce us. LeRoy gently shook my hand, smiled, said, “Nice to meet you,” and then went right back to his conversation with his daughter. I witnessed his uncensored verbosity about a frustrating family situation back in Illinois, where he’d just been. All of us gabbed some more about life and such and then I excused myself and went to work.

  LeRoy’s long, gray beard and mustache covered all of his face but his deep blue eyes and bald forehead. Other than his beard and mustache reminding me a little too much of my ex-husband’s, I felt comfortable around him—especially with his complete lack of trying to impress me.

  At lunchtime, Jody asked if her dad could call me. “Sure,” I told her. “I will have coffee with him after my divorce is final. He seems like a down-to-earth, genuine man.”

  Near the end of May, Bart’s contract as a bus driver for Jordan School District finally ended. He piled most of his things in his car and drove back to California, never to be seen again. I exuberantly rushed home, anticipating the lack of his presence. I opened all the curtains and windows he’d kept closed. The sun glistened through my crystals, transforming the darkness into a zillion multifaceted rainbows shimmering across the rooms. I barred the negative energy still hovering around, which would soon be cleared. My new life had already beckoned me thus far. Gratitude permeated my whole being. In those awakening moments, I knew what I’d deemed a totally senseless marriage had in fact been a favorable one. In two and a half years, I’d dropped three times Bart’s and Mark’s weight in baggage, and gained three times their weight in wisdom, love, and confidence.

  The timing in our lives was perfect. The papers were mailed. I’d been a single woman for a whole week before I knew it. LeRoy and I talked on the phone for hours on end. More than anything, I appreciated he was his own person. He had a life without me! He didn’t need or want me to quit living my life to keep him company or to take care of him. He’d been alone for three and a half years, since his wife of twenty-seven years had passed away. LeRoy was already a secure, very busy, stable man.

  It took us nearly two full months to get together. We finally went on our first date at Wheeler Farm, where he exhibited his1981 Firebird at the car show. We talked while we checked out hundreds of antique beauties. Then he asked me to dinner. A couple weeks later, between our busy lives, we went to a movie and then on another date. Before long, I didn’t want to go home or let him go home. I was with the most amazing man on earth.

  Talk about divine direction in our lives! Once LeRoy and I made time for our first date, we became nearly inseparable. Amid our developing, non-giddy love, I had both feet
planted firmly on the ground.

  The whole time Bart and I lived in Sandy, the house payments and utility bills were my responsibility. It turned out he had maxed out several credit cards to pay for the “red carpet.” He was in debt up the yin-yang. With my wonderful boys’, nephews’, their friends’, and LeRoy’s help, we revamped the whole yard and house, and by selling it I made enough money to pay Bart off, give the boys some for helping and to carry me through the next year.

  Jordan School District granted me a year’s leave of absence to write my book. Before LeRoy, my plans were to rent a two-bedroom apartment and write. However, he offered me a bedroom in his home in Riverton. I could stay or leave at will.

  Between our travels, families, and each other, he forever encouraged me to “hold still and write.” I procrastinated with one excuse after another. How could I possibly write fifty years of life into one book? Which stories would be the most important, and which would have to be left out?

  I was nearly two-thirds of the way through writing the rough draft of my book by April, 2008, when Texas authorities took the children from the FYZ ranch, to San Angelo. I was sick at heart and yet full of hope. My sweetheart man bought me a ticket to fly out there to find my sixty-eight-year-old sister Lucinda. Our family hadn’t heard from her in over six years. We didn’t know if she was even alive after he expelled her husband and requisitioned her to Texas to be a “House Mother” to those children he’d stolen from supposed unworthy mothers.

  In February 2004, her prophet, Warren Jeffs, married her to Alan Woodruff Steed. By November, he’d re-assigned her to Merril Jessop, her daughter’s new husband and the ex-husband of Carolyn Jessop, author of Escape. I hoped she’d dare talk to me away from his influence and while away from the YFZ compound.

  I never did find Lucinda; in fact, I never saw her again. One evening in 2011, a cousin called to tell me she’d passed away.

  The events filling those two weeks I spent in Texas and on the FYZ compound could have filled four or five chapters alone. As my amazing hostess and I sat in front of the San Angelo Coliseum and watched the FYZ children playing, I felt heartsick for them. How many times had they already been torn from their biological parents and “assigned” to other “worthy” parents? Warren Jeffs took delight in his manipulative, completely uncensored power to ruin lives and tear families apart. Many FLDS children had been shuffled from one parent to another several times already—not knowing for sure who their “real” mothers were. For many, this was another of those disruptions. Many believed, if those 401 children were sent back to the same horrendous system they’d been rescued from, they’d continue to be bartered, swapped, raped and abused. What little was left of their lives would be stolen, just as their parents had been trained to do by way of Warren’s immoral, brainwashing sermons, and his elicit examples.

  When the Division of Family Services was ordered to return the children to their parents, I wept for days. In foster care, life surely had been tough for some. But in most situations, the children were adjusting in the homes of normal families who genuinely cared about their welfare and stability. Even with initial strangers the children could have had at least an eighty-five percent less chance of being abused than in living with their polygamist parents, who as faithful followers, would (and still do) carry out any of Warren’s blasphemous and perverted commands.

  By the end of 2007, Fifty Years in Polygamy was pretty much scratched out, all but the last few chapters. Those were tough to write. By then, my desire to give the world and everyone else a piece of my mind had totally faded. I didn’t want to hurt others with what I wrote, especially Diane, her children, and my children. But I also knew I had to speak my truth, while realizing others had their own perspectives. Then I turned my book over to the universe. If it was meant to be published, it would be. If not, that would be okay as well.

  Mark and Norma are still together. Other than her ongoing battle with cancer, they seem quite content. I’m grateful Mark kept his promise to work things out with Diane “the right way.” Though she is no longer his wife; she remains good friends with him and Norma.

  I believe even though we don’t always understand our circumstances, things most often happen as they are meant to be. I wrote a letter to Norma telling her I’d forgiven her for the control she had in my family’s life. I asked her to forgive me for the resentment and anger I felt toward her, which only held me back anyway. These past seven years, I’ve been so grateful for her strong influence in Mark’s life back then. It served to speed up our ending process; giving LeRoy and I more years together than we may have had otherwise.

  I used to say, “The year I met LeRoy was the happiest year of my life,” but that happiest year turned into another one and then more. Each year I’m with him is yet another of the happiest years in my life.

  In November 2008, we bought a modest home on just over an acre of land in southern Utah, near Zion National Park. On weekends and vacation times, we painted and replaced the flooring. We bought our own furniture, including the first brand-new bed I’ve ever owned. After teaching my last year in Riverton, I rushed south to my sweetheart and our paradise, where we are surrounded by trees and love.

  Here, I talk to my plants, the wildflowers, dragonflies, snakes, squirrels, lizards, and cottontail rabbits.

  I was honored and grateful to be hired by Washington County School District. There were hundreds of applicants and a handful of teaching positions available.

  In October 2010, when Linda Prince (the woman who encouraged me to get my book ready to be published) asked if she could read my book, I felt compelled to rewrite my life’s stories without my former agenda. When I read what I’d written three years previous, it seemed like I was reading about another person’s life.

  Between teaching and family, I spent the next year in our sunroom, writing and rewriting. I’d give up, and then push forward some more. In May of 2012, I published portions of some of my stories, and nearly half of the rest of them. And just over one year later, my unabridged version of Fifty Years in Polygamy is hopefully in thousands of hands across the world as well as yours.

  Afterword

  Between our glorious and self-imposed busy lives, my husband LeRoy and I have read nearly every autobiography and book written about polygamy. We have tremendous admiration for people who were able to awaken and move forward. LeRoy and I continue to volunteer whenever and wherever we can to help people who are leaving polygamy and trying to repair their lives.

  I resigned from teaching in May 2012, after twenty-eight-plus years in the Allred Group’s private school, in Head Start, and in the public school system. My plan was to speak about my life in polygamy and advocate for those who were leaving. However, while publicizing my first book and speaking with media sources and a variety of audiences, as well as with hundreds of individuals, I learned of even more horrific experiences with polygamy. Armed with that information, I began doing more research about polygamy. With my dysfunctional past and the pasts of hundreds of former polygamists, and with human rights violations against thousands of women and children of polygamy, I became appalled that a few public families are pushing for polygamy to be decriminalized. While these families are anomalies, they’d have us believe they represent normal, average polygamous families, and that there is nothing morally or legally wrong with polygamy.

  Before long, I found myself as an activist, promoting the extinction of generational patriarchal abuses. My book sales became second to the importance of getting these messages out. I resigned as president of the HOPE organization so I could have more time. Then, I founded the Sound Choices Coalition, a partnership of organizations and individuals uniting in an effort to end human-rights violations due to polygamy and other forms of patriarchal abuse.

  After a magazine article I wrote about being and having a “sister-wife,” I was invited to be a co-producer with RIVR Media. We are working toward a project we hope A&E will debut sometime next year.

  In hopes t
he producers of Sister Wives would show the other side of patriarchal polygamy, not just the pro-polygamy attitudes of the Brown family, (who belong to the same Apostolic United Brethren) three other ex-polygamists and I participated in a filmed panel discussion at the University of Las Vegas in May 2013. What a trip! I hadn’t seen Christine, Kody’s third “wife,” my second cousin and niece, in person in about fifteen years. Her smiles, nervous giggles, and dedication to plural marriage reminded me of when I tenaciously clung to the encoding of too many years; and just like her, believed it was all about choice. But then again, maybe I’d have been tempted to stay if we’d have had a lot of media money to travel, go on luxury dates, build new homes and buy furniture . . .

  More recently, I’m hosting my own Internet radio talk show called Polygamy Uncensored, where most of my guests have polygamist backgrounds and are brave enough to inform the world about what polygamy is really about.

  There are two sides to the stories you hear about polygamy. There are stories from those who live inside of the fence, and stories from those who have lived on both sides. Of course, when we lived and believed in polygamy, there was no way you’d have heard us speak the truth. First of all, we had no idea what the truth was. For heaven’s sakes, anyone who is brainwashed certainly doesn’t know it. Secondly, you definitely don’t dare wake up and listen to your soul. (They call it the devil’s temptations.) That could mean losing everything, everyone, and all you’ve ever known. Like those now living polygamy, we also had to preserve our beliefs, our families, and our clan at all costs, even if that meant throwing certain children, teens, and wayward people under the bus with lies, cover-ups, and feigned ignorance. More often than not, it meant having to keep your blinders on, deny, justify, and lie to yourself and others so you could “endure to the end” as you had been programmed and commanded to do. From ex-polygamous voices we hear numerous firsthand accounts of abuse, heartache, control, prejudice, suicidal depression and further explicit information.