“Do you ever get tired of this?”

My friend saw this public post on Facebook:

She sent me a screenshot, asking, “Do you ever get tired of this?”  

No, I don’t get tired of people taking pictures of the house where Kody Brown used to live with his plural wives.  At least, I haven’t gotten tired of it yet. It’s not as if there’s a constant stream of cars — it’s more like a couple of times a month — and I just think it’s funny.

We always try to get a picture of the person taking pictures of us. Here’s a collection of some of the photos we’ve taken of people driving past our house while taking photos or videos.

When someone is slowly driving by with their phone out, I do find one thing annoying, to be honest: When they notice us watching them, they almost always drive away, as if they’re doing something wrong.  

Under different circumstances, I would feel differently about uninvited strangers regularly taking photos of my home.  But I understand the desire to see the original Sister Wives house.  I don’t think devotees are doing anything wrong when they seek out the house and drive by.

Rather than quickly drive away with their guilty consciences, I would prefer it if the fans would wave “Hello!” or roll down their window and say, “We’re just looking at Kody Brown’s old house!  Hope you don’t mind!”  

And yes, the Facebook post is correct. Rather than having a horse pasture across the street, we now live across from a housing development with dozens of new single-family homes. In the above photos of the cars, you can easily see signs of the ongoing construction.

We Rock the Polygamy Life

The internet has no shortage of places to discuss reality TV shows such as “Sister Wives”.

My friend hangs out on one such Facebook group. The other day this was posted (by someone I don’t personally know):

My friend texted me before commenting to make sure I was fine with her response, because she wanted to talk about me and my family. This is what she wrote:

On one hand I can see the point-of-view of the original poster, but on the other hand, I believe plural marriage has the potential to be a beautiful way of living. Nothing valuable comes easily. Having lived both monogamy (for 11 years) and polygamy (for 9 years), I say from my experience that I prefer polygamy and wouldn’t choose monogamy. I have no regrets. I am not in an abusive relationship, my children spend lots of time with their father, and I am grateful for my sisterwife and my life wouldn’t be the same without her.

I am grateful to have a family that is a good example of healthy polygamy, as evidenced by my friend’s response. By the way, I’ve known that friend since we were a little monogamous family of 4, so she has seen my family go thru a lot of history and changes.

My friend is right that my family does as much as possible together. We spend family time together every evening (I’ll write more about that soon), we pray together before bed every night, we host fellowship meetings in our home together, we vacation together, we celebrate holidays together, we spend the Sabbath together. Even on a normal weekday full of homeschool, housework, errands, and childcare, we each interact quite a bit. I can see how a polygamous family living in separate houses could fall apart like Kody Brown’s seems to be. But we lived apart for the first 5 years after Melissa joined the family, and we still did what it took to be united.