Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [153]
I tried to conquer this awkwardness by dressing differently, but it wasn’t that simple. Each new day brought with it the anxiety of not being able to “look the part.” My attempts to blend in only made me stand out more as I wore unusual combinations, such as T-shirts with my long skirts and thick FLDS tights, thinking that it made me look normal. I’d always wanted to wear normal clothes and had done so on occasion as part of my attempt to test my individuality, but with nothing familiar to cling to, I sought refuge in my old FLDS wardrobe.
My hair, too, was a huge source of worry for me. Because FLDS women were all raised to keep their hair long, I’d never had a haircut aside from a few wispy bangs, and now my thick, blond locks fell down past my waist. I had mastered my hair as a member of the FLDS and I knew how to sweep it up and back, pin it properly, and construct the tight braids that were all the rage in our society. But now I found it impossible to get in step with the styles of this new world I was in, leaving me no other option than a French braid that looked ridiculously out of place in the streets of Hurricane and St. George. It was too long and I felt completely uncomfortable with it loose. Seeing strangers with their hair in shoulder-length blunt cuts or easy, free curls made me long to look like them, but I just didn’t know how.
Part of what made our transition so difficult was that we barely had the financial resources to cover our bills, let alone acquire new clothes. In Colorado City there is no such thing as a mortgage or rent payment. A church-run trust called the United Effort Plan or UEP owns the land on which the people reside, and lots are awarded to worthy members of the priesthood to build on with the expectation of a monthly donation to the church of 10 percent of a man’s income. Of course, members are encouraged to donate as much as they can, and many contribute significantly more. A portion of the monthly tithing is used to fund the communal storehouse where we purchased some of our food, paper goods, and other necessities at a very low cost. We had lived our lives in big families and the shopping was done for us and usually in bulk at stores like Costco.
As a result, we’d never had to think about everyday money issues. Lamont and I were now confronting the jaw-dropping prices at the local grocery stores. To make matters worse, Lamont had taken an unpaid leave of absence from his job as a field operations manager for a local construction company that first week to help me make the initial adjustment, but my uncontrollable crying scared and confused him. He was worried that I regretted my choice to be with him. While his support during those days was invaluable, the loss of income left us unable to make our rent that month, creating a hole that we then had to dig ourselves out of.
The financial pressures would have been hard for anyone, but we knew absolutely nothing about money management. Financial planning was not part of any curriculum either of us had been taught, and because we’d been raised to think that the end of the world was imminent, we had always learned that personal credit was of no value to us. With little credit history to speak of, we both struggled with employers and banks that demanded such information.
During this time I was also undergoing the hormonal struggles that most pregnant women endure, which made me unpredictably emotional and particularly weepy. I had secretly seen a midwife before my departure from Short Creek, and because of my complicated history with pregnancies she advised me to see an ob-gyn. I was already in my twenty-fourth week, and the doctor recommended that because of my Rh-negative blood, I should have injections of Rh immunoglobulin (RhIg) to suppress my body’s ability to react to Rh-positive red cells. While he couldn’t say for sure, he believed that this could have been a part of the problem with