Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [3]
But when the revelry of the night gave way to the realities of daylight, the anxiety of the situation became palpable. Receiving another mother into the family is supposed to be a wonderful, joyous occasion; we had always been taught that this was a gift from God to be celebrated and revered. But beneath our outward joy, a larger, ominous tension lurked, as no one—not my father, my mother, Mother Audrey, or my siblings—was sure how this would impact the volatile chemistry that was already at work in our house.
For as long as I could remember, there had been an undercurrent of contention and unrest in our family. The relationship between Mother Audrey and my mother was complex and often fraught with misunderstanding as their natural feelings of insecurity and jealousy created problems for us all. Trying to coexist in a single-family home with multiple children and two women sharing the same husband had presented challenges that began soon after my mother arrived more than twenty-five years earlier.
Dad met Audrey when he was fifteen. They attended the same high school and traveled there on the same bus. Dad was class president and a football star in his junior year at Carbon High School when a friend set him up with Audrey, a beautiful and vibrant senior. Audrey was smart, educated, and outgoing. The chemistry was right, and they became sweethearts, marrying in August of 1954.
Since neither was raised in the FLDS Church, they came to the faith by chance. After Dad and Audrey had been married for several years, Audrey’s parents converted to the fundamentalist religion. Eager to bring them back to mainstream Mormonism, Dad and Audrey began to study the FLDS religion to learn all that they could about the faith. At the time the church was still known as the Work, and Dad and Audrey’s plan was to scrutinize The Work’s teachings and find its flaws, but instead found themselves swayed to its views.
A few years after joining the FLDS, my father saw my mother, the woman who would become his second wife, through a chance encounter during a trip down to southern Utah. Dad’s training as a geologist made him a valuable resource to the FLDS community, and at that time he’d been working a lot with the main community in the twin border cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, helping them to find sources of potable water.
My mom grew up in an FLDS family in southern Utah and was a member of the church choir. My father first noticed her during a service he attended one Sunday, as she sat with the choir waiting to perform. She bent down and whispered something to her father, Newel Steed, the conductor of the choir, and the slight movement caught my Dad’s attention.
Dad later told me that at that moment, he heard a voice telling him, “Sharon Steed belongs to you as your next wife and you will speak next.” Dad was extremely surprised when he was called up to the podium just minutes later to address the people. Men of the FLDS are taught they hold power to receive some direct revelation from God and Dad believed this was God’s message to him. Following church teachings at the time, my father returned to Salt Lake City and began to pray about his revelation. To his amazement, a few months after he arrived back in Salt Lake, Audrey told him about her own revelation. She had dreamt that a woman named Sharon Steed belonged to their family, and she asked Dad if he knew who she was. Up until this point, my father hadn’t told anyone about his revelation, so hearing this from Audrey was a surprise. That day, he told her about Sharon and they began to pray together.
More than a year passed and nothing happened. Soon afterward, Dad heard that Sharon was going to be placed with another man. Disappointed and worried that he had misunderstood the revelation, he confided in Audrey’s brother, who suggested that Dad speak to the man who was then the head of the church—the prophet Leroy S. Johnson, commonly referred to as “Uncle Roy.” (In the FLDS religion, the term “uncle” is