Say More: At Last She Writes It

No. 23 | September 2024

Remnants of Polygamy

by Colleen

As a child, I had a happy home where I felt loved and free.

I was the family peacemaker, middle child of seven. Adult life has not been so easy though. I don’t want to go back to what my adult life used to be. It’s still so hard to visit some of those painful memories.

I remember as a newlywed crying myself to sleep some nights because I felt so alone. I had moved away from all my family and everything I knew to marry my husband who was basically a stranger to me. I always told people we had a marriage arranged by God, only six dates spread out over three years and 700 miles before we got engaged. I was a stranger to my husband too and to everyone in my new life. I didn’t have any built in support system. I completely lost my identity without connection to my old life and family. This was before the days of internet and cell phones, so communication was limited to snail mail.

I remember being a 20 year old newlywed and having my husband look (I interpreted it as more of an ogle than a look) at a well-endowed woman crossing the road while I was sitting next to him in the car. When he saw me notice, he used the excuse that he was just checking her out for his brother who wasn’t married. I was not blessed with large breasts, almost nonexistent in the opinion of a young man in one of my high school classes who loudly announced to the entire class how deficient I was in that area. He knew because he had looked down my shirt (which was very modest by the way) and saw that I was so underdeveloped that I didn’t even need a bra. I was 16 at the time. Was my new husband looking forward to choosing another woman who was more well-endowed than I was? Surely he would enjoy her more than me. Doesn’t polygamy allow for that?

I remember as a young mother praying for my husband to be guided by the Lord in his dreams (his patriarchal blessing says he would be). Shortly after those very specific prayers, my husband said he had had a dream. You might imagine my excitement believing that the Lord had heard my prayers. My mood quickly sank as he told me he dreamed that he took his old girlfriend as a second wife. He didn’t believe that the dream was anything prophetic, just a dream, but I wondered if his dream was some kind of cruel answer to my prayer to prepare me for future polygamy. Are women’s feeling really so unimportant to God? Did my husband secretly long for another wife? Wasn’t I enough for him? Was I already being replaced in his heart?

I remember being introduced to the article by Eugene England published in 1987, (on fidelity, polygamy and celestial marriage) and feeling thrilled about the possibility of monogamy in heaven, that polygamy was nothing more than an Abrahamic test to try God’s people. For the first time in my life since knowing about polygamy, I felt comfort and hope. I was then a young mother of just two children. I remember sharing my joy about the article with my husband. I did my best to communicate the comfort it brought to my pained heart, making it clear that I wasn’t taking it as doctrine, but as something that gave me hope, only to be met with chastisement for believing something that didn’t come from the brethren. Something within me died that day. I accepted the belief that my thoughts and feelings didn’t matter to my husband. It wasn’t safe to express them. I accepted the belief that women’s thoughts and feelings didn’t matter to God either, because no God who cared about His daughters would allow polygamy. I locked away a part of me and resigned myself to silencing my voice, submitting to men and their opinions because it felt safer. It felt like the nail in the coffin of my self-worth.