Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [20]
Though Craig had been raised to see Andrea’s placement as a revelation from God, he questioned more than ever the arrangement. At the time, he worried that Larry and others had contrived the marriage and suspected it had little to do with any divine inspiration. He was coming to question the most fundamental aspect of our way of life: divine revelation from God regarding placement marriage. A thought like this went against everything we knew, but with no outlet for his questions, Craig continued to struggle inwardly.
When Mother Laura moved in, his internal debate began to bubble over in noticeable ways, and he was sometimes confrontational. It wasn’t just about how Mother Laura behaved; her presence was a constant reminder that the church’s values were flawed and that plural marriage was not working in our home. Laura had a forceful personality, a trait that combined with Audrey’s similar personality seemed to drown out our mother. I was too young to really know what was going on or see the dynamic, but I could tell that Craig’s concern only grew as he came to feel that Mom was not being treated properly.
Looking back, I wonder if a lot of the fights may have arisen because neither Dad nor Audrey knew how to live in plural marriage. Even if you’re raised in plural marriage and have a model for it, it’s difficult to make it work—to know when to compromise, when to complain, and when to involve the father. If you’re not careful, minor scuffles can snowball into ugly conflicts. Since Audrey grew up in a monogamous family, it seemed hard for her to take a conciliatory tone, and with the addition of Laura’s assertiveness, my mother’s needs frequently got lost in the fray.
My mother’s background only made things more complicated, because she knew all too well that plural marriage, with all its intricacies, could work under the right circumstances. Mom had been raised in a household that was held up as the ideal plural family, where the mothers got along and all the kids truly saw one another as siblings. Mom embraced her faith and the FLDS teaching in regard to women, and desired a peaceful household. As it wasn’t Mom’s way to engage in fights with the other women in the house, she would often retreat instead of getting in the middle and making things worse. Everyone on Mom’s side felt that Dad should stand up for her more, and we were upset when he allowed the more forceful wives to take charge.
The situation failed to improve with time. Craig, being my mother’s oldest son, took on the responsibility of advocating for her and her children when no one else would. When his conflicts with Mothers Audrey and Laura escalated, my father was often pulled in, leading to contention between him and Craig. Some fights got so heated that they turned physical. I had always seen my dad as an even-tempered and reasonable man, but now it was slowly beginning to show that he was consumed by the situation and having trouble controlling his feelings. It appeared that in Dad’s mind, Craig was affecting the other boys in the home and tainting their beliefs, and in trying to solve this problem, he was losing his grip on our family and on himself.
Dad tried to address the family’s dissension during our regular Sunday-school lessons in the living room. As our priesthood head, he was in charge of educating his children on our religion and its principles. Everyone, even the mothers, was expected to attend Sunday lessons. Typically, the kids fought for a seat on one of the two couches. Whoever didn’t get a seat on the couch got relegated to the floor.
Dad was a stickler for punctuality, and the lesson began promptly at 10 A.M., usually with a reading from the Book of Mormon or the Bible. The lesson usually lasted about an hour, during which Dad would select one or two of us to stand and bear witness, while he sat on the couch in front of the big windows. I could always tell when he was about to raise the family issues because he’d begin talking about the “United Order,” a teaching that stressed the importance