“Ah,” I said, smiling. “Well, no wonder it turned out so well, then.”
There was a moment of his hand on mine when I felt that we were one, as Kurt had said marriage could make you. Maybe it wasn’t meant to last for more than a moment or two, so that it was always something you held close, and tried to get back to.
“Talitha is going to be quite a handful in a few years,” Kurt said, after he wiped the tears from his own face.
She was now plucking flowers out of the pots and throwing excess petals at her cousins and younger siblings.
“She’s a handful now,” I said.
And she was going to be our handful for the next week, as Kenneth and Naomi went on their honeymoon. I was looking forward to every minute of that time with her, time to be a mother again.
Maybe it was what I needed to heal, to find myself again. If loving service was the heart of Mormonism, maybe I just needed to get back to that and forget all the rest.
The food arrived at the tables set up on the grass, and I sat next to Anna as we ate and she commented on what she thought she or I would have done better ourselves. I danced with Kenneth, and Kurt took the traditional father-daughter dance with Naomi. We ate good food, toasted with soda, juice, and no alcohol as per the negotiation between Kenneth and Kurt.
For a few sacred hours, I felt as much a part of an eternal family in that park with my sons around me, my baby granddaughter and my adoptive granddaughter-to-be, my daughters-in-law, and my best friend as I ever had. Heaven might be better than this, but I couldn’t imagine it if it was.
Author’s Note
When I began writing this book about dealing with the effects of Mormon polygamy in the modern era, I knew very little of the historical facts that I discovered in the course of my research. Though the church insists that polygamy ended in 1890, I found that it persisted into the twentieth century, a fact that the official documents of the church obscured for most of my adult life.
Over the course of writing this book, I also sought out polygamists who consider themselves part of the larger Mormon community and began to listen to their stories. Some are FLDS, and their stories were often heartbreaking. Some have left; others continue within the community for various reasons. Then there were other groups, the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB), the True and Living Church (TLC), and Centennial Park groups. The neglect of children, the abuse of women, the lack of education—these are all real problems, not to mention the emotional scars that come from a controlling community.
I’ve read exposés about the sex lives of the men involved in these unions, but have also heard from those who truly consider polygamy to be a holy practice and who claim they are not involved in abusive relationships (yes, I am also skeptical of this, but I have tried to let people speak for themselves and not impose my own judgments on them). I also spent time watching Escaping Polygamy on A&E, which is about the Kingston clan, and which is just as horrible as Stephen Carter’s independent polygamous group, though perhaps wealthier and more complicated.
And then there are the independent polygamists whose experiences I used to build Stephen’s purported conversion to polygamy, which he shares with Rebecca. If you listened to these people speak, you might feel, as I did, torn by your assumptions about abuse and control and the clear-eyed, open-hearted people in front of you. I try hard not to judge others in the practice of their religion. Polygamists who eschew child marriage are, at least, avoiding the worst aspects, as are those who make sure that wives and children are well educated.