Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [70]
—WARREN JEFFS
The flowered clock on the wall read 4:30 A.M. as I stood in front of the mirror in Mom’s room blankly looking at my reflection. The face that stared back was foreign to me. In place of the young, spirited fourteen-year-old there stood an empty-looking body with eyes that were swollen and irritated from hours of crying.
“So, this is what death is like,” I whispered to myself.
I barely flinched as Mom straightened my shoulders, which were rounded and heavy from the burden of the past week. She was trying to correct my posture so that my sister Kassandra could get an accurate measurement for the hem of my wedding dress.
The night had been long and exhausting. After my terrible “first date” with Allen I had escaped to the comfort of my own room, where my mother had found me. I had sensed her hesitation even before she uttered a word.
“Lesie, maybe this is the right thing to do,” she gently prodded. “This must be the will of God and the prophet.”
“Mom, I just can’t do this,” I replied in desperation.
“Everyone expects you to,” Mom stated matter-of-factly. She had watched as I’d gone back and forth between Uncle Fred and Uncle Warren in my attempts to halt the marriage or at least gain more time. But time and again, she’d found me crying in our room, frustrated over my inability to convince the powers that be that this was not my time.
“You have to do this,” Mom admitted. “You have no other choice.”
It was hard hearing those words from her. Her support from the previous week seemed to evaporate that night, and suddenly I felt hurt that she was giving in. I didn’t understand what had caused the shift, and I was crushed to have the most important person in my life surrendering to Uncles Warren and Fred. At that moment, I felt angry at the whole world. What I didn’t know then was that Mom had been secretly pulled aside and told that it was her responsibility to make sure that the marriage took place, as the prophet had directed. She’d been instructed to make it happen “or else.”
So many people find it difficult to understand why I am no longer angry with my mother. It is hard for outsiders to comprehend the mind-set that came with our culture. We were taught that the priesthood and the prophet come before anything else, and Mom had already been forced to make this choice with six of her own children. It’s hard to explain why she just didn’t pack me up and take me away, but in her mind making that step would have damned us both. She was already a part God’s chosen people and she didn’t want to give up the utopia she believed she was already in.
To her, the outside world was like stepping into hell and nothing was worth trading that for. Because Fred and Warren were holding her accountable, if I failed to follow through with the marriage I would not only condemn myself, I would condemn her, too. Not only would she be risking eternal life, she would also be forced to choose a loss of home and community, and a relationship with the older and younger daughters she still had in the FLDS. As such, her feelings were rooted in a concern not just for my salvation, but for her own and for the safety of her two youngest daughters. Like so many FLDS members, Mom was a true follower. She’d been taught to strictly conform to the priesthood. Knowing the strength of my mother’s belief, I guess it never crossed her mind to question whether this church, this life, was right if it forced her fourteen-year-old daughter into marriage. If she did question that, she would have to face many other decisions she had made in her painful past.
Even then, I knew she had no “real” choice. The church was her home. It was all she’d ever known, and she, like thousands of others, couldn’t leave or risk giving up her and her children’s place among the faithful.
Ultimately, while it hurt to have her join the chorus of voices pushing me, I knew Fred and Warren were behind it; when I heard her say those words, it was as though they