Posts by Charlotte – Page 23 – Speaking of Polygamy…

I live in the house from Seasons 1 and 2 of Sister Wives. The house was built with a plural family in mind and has 6000 square feet with 3 separate “apartments,” all connected on the inside.

The 3 apartments have their own separate entrances, kitchens, laundry rooms, and master bedrooms, so each wife has her own space. But since they’re connected on the inside, to a plural family, it has many benefits of a single-family dwelling. (Technically — according to the city and the post office, for instance– it is a single-family dwelling, despite my talk of different “apartments”.)

The house is described on the Wikipedia page “List of Sister Wives episodes”:

They live in a ranch-style home that, although interconnected, is subdivided into three separate apartments that give each wife her own bedroom, kitchen and living space.

(By the way, the Sister Wives episodes stopped getting updated on that Wikipedia page a couple of years ago, so if you’re an avid watcher, maybe you should tackle the job of editing that page.)

One of the funny things about living here is that I get mail for Kody, Meri, Janelle, and Christine Brown on a regular basis. I’m sometimes tempted to see if anyone on eBay would like to buy it as an amusing souvenir, just like I’m tempted to save it up for a few days and upload to this post a photo of all of it, but both those things seem like an invasion of privacy that I wouldn’t like done to me (golden rule and all that), not to mention it might be illegal (USPS and all that), so I will refrain.

Another funny thing about living in this house is that every once in a while we’ll notice someone driving past really slowly with their phone/camera out. You can read one fan’s accounts of doing just that in this blog post. You could do the same, but you could also save yourself the trouble by just looking at this photo of the house on the Sister Wives Wikipedia page:

Kody Brown's house as shown on Wikipedia — photo from the *Sister Wives* Wikipedia page

Or another option if you haven’t seen it yet: here is a 3-minute video from Sister Wives that will take you on a brief virtual tour.

Screenshot 2018-02-04 22.52.10 — screenshot from the TLC.com video showing Kody giving a tour of the house

The house was formerly only the 2 apartments on the right, but from what I understand, the man who owned it before Kody Brown added on the 3rd apartment.

Screenshot 2018-02-05 05.51.14 — cross-section of the house showing which of Kody’s wives lived in which apartment

I live in the upper right part of the house, the one in which Meri lived with her daughter Mariah. The plan is for my sisterwife to move in with me this summer; she’ll live in the apartment Janelle was in (the whole left side).

One day, before we bought it from the Browns but after they had moved away from Utah, they were back at their Lehi house for a visit with some mutual friends and us, and some of their fans drove by. They knew the house and recognized their car as the Browns, so they decided to try their luck, and they stopped and got out. Joshua (my husband) was outside at the time, and he came inside to tell Kody and Meri some of their adoring fans wanted to meet them. Kody refused to go out and meet them — he said he didn’t want to encourage strangers to show up at his house, but he was happy to talk to fans when they saw him in public — but Meri was nice and went out to pose for a photo or give her autograph or whatever.

Shortly before we bought the Lehi house in the summer of 2016, the Browns filmed an episode here. I assume that episode was airing when he tweeted about the sale:

Screenshot 2018-02-03 18.07.20 — Kody Brown’s tweet about the sale of the Lehi house. (Yes, Kathleen Jones @dancerndreamer9, a polygamous family did buy it.)

We don’t generally tell friends and acquaintances the history of the house before they come for a visit, but people occasionally recognize it when they arrive here for the first time.

Once, we were driving home from swimming lessons. My children and I were all dressed in our swimsuits and I didn’t have my cell phone or wallet. We saw a vegetable stand being run by a couple of boys, and I pulled over for just a minute to buy some cucumbers and jalapeños. (Since I didn’t have my wallet or purse, I could only spend as much as I had coins in my car’s ashtray. 🙂 ) When we buckled back in to drive away, my car wouldn’t start. The mom of one of the boys felt bad for me and gave all of us a ride home. (The vegetable-selling-boys felt sorry for as us well and gave us free jalapeños. 🙂 ) As I gave the woman the final step of driving directions to get to the Lehi house, she said, “Oh! That’s the Browns’ house! Do you know them? Are you renting it from them?”

That experience was kind of funny, and not an isolated incident. Another time, we gave some friends permission to host a charity yard sale here (the yard is big, there’s plenty of parking, and the city is more centrally-located than where they live) and one of the families that came from two counties away to support the yard sale recognized the house from the TV show.

I was texting with an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in years. I never told her I had become a polygamist in the meantime, and out of nowhere she asks if I was practicing polygamy. To this day she swears she knew it out of pure instinct (I think she credited her “womanly intuition”). Anyway, I confirmed she was right, and she told me she’d been watching Sister Wives for years and was slightly obsessed with polygamy (although she doesn’t want to live it), and I said, ha ha I actually live in Kody Brown’s old house. She and I had been trying to get together for ages and had never been able to make it work out, but the pull of seeing the Lehi house up-close-and-in-person was strong enough that she made the hour-plus drive to see me only 3 days after that texting conversation. 🙂

(If you wanted to see the inside of the Lehi house, one way you could invite yourself in would be to pretend you’re interested in Mormon fellowships and attend one of the church-y meetings we hold here most Sundays, which reminds me: a person or two who has shown up to the fellowship has recognized the Lehi house as well.)

So far I’ve been living here for about 18 months, and we haven’t lived here as a plural family yet, but I’ve still loved living in a house like this one, and I’m constantly baffled that more people (monogamous or polygamous) don’t build houses with similar layouts. The other people that live here and I are able to be supportive of each other without having to go through the difficulties of sharing living space. Over the holidays, we had a couple of out-of-town families stay here, and they were able to come and go between the 3 apartments as they wished, depending on whom they wanted to visit and what they wanted to do.

Other things I like about living here:

Janelle’s old apartment has an 800-square-foot kitchen that we’ve stashed lots of tables and chairs in, which we often use for events (such as our weekly fellowship, family parties, and our celebrations of the Biblical feasts whenever we extend the invitation beyond our immediate family).

Screenshot 2018-02-06 22.16.17 — Janelle’s huge kitchen

The lot size is slightly more than an acre, so there’s plenty of room for what we want to do with the land. (1 acre might not sound like a ton of land if you’re a farmer, but it’s the biggest piece of land I’ve ever owned.) So far there are some fruit trees, a shed, a garden, a “forest” for the kids to play in, a big yard with a sprinkling system, 2 back decks, and a parked family member’s school bus, which is slowly being converted into an RV.
The driveway fits 7 or 8 cars, depending on how poorly everyone parks. 🙂
Right across the street is a field with horses, which in my opinion make excellent neighbors.
Even though it feels rural here, we’re within 5 minutes of the freeway, our bank, and our main shopping locations.
The apartments my family doesn’t currently need have been pretty easy to rent out to extended family/friends.
The neighbors are sympathetic to plural families, which is extremely nice.

Note: I’ve never actually watched Sister Wives, so please forgive any errors about the TV show. Feel free to leave a comment correcting anything I got wrong.

Update on November 12th, 2022: Melissa and I started watching Sister Wives. See blog posts here.

My parents raised my siblings and me to be faithful, active members of the LDS Church. We were all born in Utah, we attended Church as a family every Sunday, and we accepted every assignment our Church leaders were in the mood to give us. We had Family Home Evening on Monday nights and every morning we read the scriptures as a family. As children we all got baptized at age 8, and as youth we attended all the requisite youth classes and activities. When I was 15 years old my dad became the bishop of our ward (local congregation). All of us married in the temple, and all the brothers and brothers-in-law served missions. Etc. We were “good Mormons.”

I was taught to receive personal revelation, but only in the context of 1. Gaining a testimony, and 2. Making big life decisions such as whom to marry and what career path to follow. Besides those 2 categories of revelation, knowing what to do was a matter of following the commandments and instructions as laid out by the Church leaders, both the local leadership and the General Authorities. It wasn’t until I was married with kids that I finally figured out I had been missing personal revelation category # 3. God’s guidance in the life of the individual, if she’ll only let him lead her down the path he has for her and her alone. (This fact was right in front of me the whole time, since General Conference and General Authorities give general guidelines, not specific directions. Duh. Man, am I slow sometimes.)

I remember when I was a young adult and I started to have questions about the Church and the gospel, my father would answer me by saying things such as, “Well, I’ve never heard that topic talked about in General Conference, so I don’t worry about it.” He genuinely believed (believes) that obeying and following Church leaders defines righteousness. This was what I was taught to believe as well, and that’s how I felt for my entire life up to my mid-20s.

My very limited experience with polygamy and polygamists

When I was a young child, my LDS aunt (my dad’s sister) became convinced that polygamy was required for exaltation (the Mormon name for the highest level of heaven), and when she couldn’t convince her LDS husband to take another wife, she left her marriage, deserted her 4 tiny children (the youngest was 6 months old), and became a plural wife. I would never recommend anyone do this. (Fortunately, my aunt’s amazing ex-husband ended up getting remarried to a wonderful woman who raised the abandoned children with love, and who has earned enough loyalty and respect from them to be called “Mom.”) I believe watching his sister make such a life-wrecking decision was traumatic for my father. I think it’s one of the reasons he rejected my polygamy so vehemently (I’ll share more details about his reaction in the future). He has had a difficult time seeing that in the case of his sister’s polygamy, her children lost their mother, but in the case of my polygamy, my children have essentially gained a mother.

I remember as a child seeing fundies in a grocery store and my mom hissing, “Don’t look at them — they’re polygamists!”

These few memories are all the experiences with polygamy I remember having in my childhood, aside from the confusing stories of polygamy I heard in Church itself, which I never understood but which I knew were controversial. Even in my gospel studies as an adult, I procrastinated looking into “the whole polygamy thing” because I had a vague idea that it was troubling, and I suspected I wasn’t scholarly enough to understand it or even retain my faith if I looked too deeply into it. As you’ll see later in my story, I never did get around to studying the issue, even though in 2013 I had clear enough personal revelation (category 3) to know God wanted me to live it and I plunged right in.