My Story

I grew up LDS. I was monogamous for 11 years. I used to detest polygamy, and at one point I was even convinced that Joseph Smith didn’t practice it and D&C 132 was fabricated by Brigham Young. Now I’m happily married to a man who has another wife, I live in a house with a layout meant for polygamists, and I have a blog about polygamy. How did I get here? Who is this person? I never thought my life would turn out like this!

Here is my story, in bits and pieces, told as well as I know how to tell it. (Hyperlinks will continue to be added as the story is written.)

• My faithful LDS upbringing and my (scant) childhood experiences with polygamy
• A story about a primary teacher ignoring Jacob’s polygamy
• How Joshua and I met
• Our courtship and monogamous marriage
• How Melissa and I met
• I realized LDS Church leaders don’t claim to receive revelation, and that led me to accept responsibility to receive revelation for myself
• Influential books/articles I read
• My desire to receive personal revelation and my failures and successes
• My husband Joshua and me receiving revelations in harmony with each other while at the same time my best friend Melissa and me receiving seemingly conflicting revelations
• Melissa and I giving each other a high five when we concluded we would never have to live polygamy (I used to hate even the concept, which I talk briefly about in this post, and so did she)
• Melissa’s bad marriage ending and her ending up living with us
• Mind-blowing, sickening revelations that Melissa was going to marry Joshua
• Being amazed as I was taught that Joshua could be a fantastic plural husband
• Thinking I was ready but realizing I wasn’t
• The First Conversation We Ever Had About It (which I opened by asking, “Joshua, are you going to marry Melissa?”)
• The Most Awkward Conversation of All Time (the award goes to Joshua and Melissa)
• Consecrating finances
• Troubles with teenagers and my moving to a different house (I briefly describe my feelings in this post)
• The plural wedding
• Grabbing on to each other and figuring it out
• Getting used to sharing my husband and parenting alone half the time (the emotions of it are discussed in this post and this post)
• Keeping it a secret and pretending everything was normal
• Revealing the truth to loved ones, talked about in this post, this post, and this post
• First steps away from the LDS Church
• Being betrayed by family members
• Meeting other polygamists! (One example is in this post)
• Getting excommunicated from the Church
• Finding fellowship elsewhere
• Buying the Sister Wives house (I wrote this post about what it’s like to live here)
• My sisterwife inducing lactation in order to help breastfeed our first plural baby
• Becoming comfortable with the idea of having 3 wives
• Asking another woman to court us
• Being betrayed by friends
• Overcoming challenges in our relationships
• Finally living together
• Overcoming the shame of being a polygamist and being proud instead

A little about me personally, in case you were wondering… I love studying Hebrew, stargazing, dancing, all things math, playing the piano, organizing, and reading books to my children. And I love getting comments and emails from readers of my blog. Besides the posts linked to above, I tell a few personal stories in this post, this post and this post, and I talk a little about myself and my family in my very first post.

Melissa (my sisterwife) wrote a post about how her teenage children took the news that she was becoming a plural wife, and another one about how her friend took the same news. She also wrote a post about what it was like being a secret wife and another one about being plural in public. In this post and this post she shares stories about the co-parenting aspect of being a plural family and some of the adaptations that she’s gone thru in joining our family. She shares a funny polygamy problem in this post and a nice experience in this post.

Joshua (our husband) wrote about our keeping polygamy a secret and the challenges of coming out to family and friends in his post titled “Hidden Wife, Hidden Life.” He also wrote a post about the assumption one of our blog readers had about how we must have been raised in polygamy (which we weren’t). In this post and this post he tells a story of being asked to perform a renewal of vows ceremony. In this post he tells of an incident that happened between him and our son. In this post he talks a little about his childhood and in this postthis post a little about his LDS mission.