My Body and Other Adventures: Polygamists and Polyamorists
My great-great-great-grandfather had seven wives and 49 children. I have two partners, and we’re trying to have our first child. About the only thing I have in common with my Mormon ancestor is non-monogamy.
As we’ve been contemplating what it means to build a non-monogamous, non-faith-based family in the 2020s, I’ve been reading a lot of things about the efforts toward gaining greater legal acknowledgment of “non-traditional families.” We’re worried about boring things like inheritance laws, our shared ability to deal with medical emergencies, insurance, property laws, zoning laws, and a million other little things. We are lucky to be in a position to start navigating these issues because I suspect that as we build up this family, we will find there are more institutions that will present us with even greater challenges.
We are not the only poly family trying to do this. I consume stories, like that of the three California dads who won the battle to get all of their names on their child’s birth certificate, or the benefits being offered to families with more than two adults in Sommerville, Massachusetts. These are issues that also affect blended families because in some states, a child can only have two legal parents. This means that if someone with a child remarries, their old spouse must either forfeit their legal rights or their new spouse cannot be a parent.
There are all kinds of arguments for expanding our legal definition of family. I’m a millennial who has been relatively lucky, but I’ve watched my friends struggle through a recession, crippling student debt, and now a pandemic. My peer group is having fewer children, and having them later because it takes us longer to achieve financial stability. We have roommates into our 30s and beyond who become like family. We’re pooling resources in new ways, we’re more likely to live in multigenerational households, and we’re more likely to practice some form of non-monogamy. My dream retirement involves a giant property with my partners, my best friend and their partners, and all the kids and grandkids we can compel/persuade/bribe to visit us.
There’s another group besides broke, free-love-loving millennials asking the government to expand its definition of family, and that’s where we get back to my great-great-great-grandfather. Around the time it became clear that the only way for Utah to become a state would be for it to abolish polygamy, the head of the Church of Latter-day Saints had a revelation from Heavenly Father that officially ended the Mormon practice of plural marriage in 1890 — although that didn’t really take so it was made even more forbidden in 1904. My ancestral family practiced plural marriage from its beginning among Joseph Smith’s original followers until it was discontinued, and the way they talk about the last polygamist of the family is odd. He’s someone who is a bit of curiosity, but they are also proud of him. The church’s history of polygamy isn’t something embarrassing or bad; it was godly for the time that it lasted, and we can still celebrate those men and their many, many wives.
If you do the math, you might notice that a culture that allows a man to have many wives but doesn’t allow women a similar freedom might end up with an excess of single men and a deficit of single women. It’s fairly well-documented that a lot of FLDS (Fundamental Church of Latter-Day Saints) communities, a renegade group of Mormons who broke off from the LDS church and still practice polygamy to this day, tend to push young men out of the community as they get older. In popular culture, folks have been introduced to Mormons practicing plural marriage through television shows like Sister Wives (2010–), Big Love (2006–2011), headlines about Warren Jeffs, or the Jon Krakauer book Under The Banner of Heaven (2003).
Maybe it’s because most of my dad’s family are still practicing Mormons, but I’ve had a pretty intense fascination with the history and the current church. Honestly, writing this is hard, as my stories about my personal life have caused some pretty absurd kerfuffles among that side of the family. I’m sort of hoping this column flies under their radar because here’s the thing: I’m not a fan of the Mormon church. In my experience, it’s a place where most women are valued for their ability to be mothers and not much else. It’s a place that doesn’t value people who don’t fit in or embrace conformity. And the veneer of “nice Mormons” hides a very mean streak. Admittedly, this is simply based on my experience with my family and their community, but it isn’t a very positive experience. I’ve watched them laugh about the 10-year-old kid next door who keeps showing up around meal times because he’s clearly hungry. I’ve seen girls “homeschooled” because their parents want them to help with raising the younger children. And I’ve watched everyone shrug off the fact that my grandmother has been patiently waiting to die as long as I can remember. I find it hard to believe that the plural-marriage-flavored Mormons are much better.
Why does it matter? Beyond the fact that I think a ton of abuse is allowed to happen under the name of plural marriage, many polygamists have been joining up with the pluralists to push for legislation that allows that much-needed broader definition of family. Kody Brown of Sister Wives and his family have been one of the big faces of the movement to make polygamy more palatable to the general public and more legal. I’m not going to lie, this makes me deeply uncomfortable.
A New Yorker article explored this uncomfortable alliance earlier this year. In it, Yale Law School professor Douglas NeJaime said, “If parentage doesn’t turn on gender or biology but on the parent-child bond, then laws that have limited it by number no longer seem logical.” I completely agree with this statement. Our child or children will have three parents, and we will be raising it or them together as a unit. Genetics will not change that. But I wonder how close my great-great-great-grandfather’s bond was to those 49 children he sired. How do we determine a parent-child bond?
I remember watching Sister Wives (go ahead and judge me, I do) years ago. In the show, Kody has three or four wives, depending on which season you’re watching, and I think they made it up to 18 children. Like in many large families I’ve seen, the younger children on the show were often passed around between adults and older children because no one person had the time or emotional resources to devote to a child. In a 2014 episode, one of the children starts feeling ill. She gets worse, they think she has the flu, and eventually, she is taken to the hospital where she nearly dies of acute kidney failure due to dehydration. At some point, the various people caring for the child, who was still in diapers when this happened, realized that she hadn’t peed in days. Now, I’m not a parent, and I understand that having a child can be intense, but I also can’t imagine simply not knowing that a sick baby in diapers has not urinated in days. This was the last episode I watched because I just couldn’t deal, but it does make me wonder: Does simply giving genetic material constitute a bond in this case?
If so, how is that bond closer to that of my good friend and his stepmother? She couldn’t be his legal parent in the state where they live, but they adore each other. She calls him her son, he calls her his bonus mom. She taught him how to bake cookies, and they still talk all the time. He also has an incredible relationship with his biological/legal mother, but both bonds deserve to be acknowledged. Both of his moms should be able to visit him at the hospital if something ever happens to him.
Where does this leave me? I don’t know. I can’t imagine making common cause with something I find so distasteful, something that I think frequently leads to deeply abusive situations. I’m also aware that there are people who assume I am being exploited in some weird way by being in a poly relationship. I’m honestly not sure how, but that’s what they truly think. Maybe it’s because they think that since my partners are not monogamous either, I must therefore be getting exploited. Do I owe the women of Sister Wives the same courtesy that I want? I don’t know. I certainly can’t assume that the women of the FLDS community at Short Creek aren’t in abusive situations; I spent a chunk of 2020 reading “I escaped a cult” memoirs (it was a weird year). Am I fighting to destigmatize these cults? Certainly not. What I am sure of is that I am fighting to destigmatize polyamory and for the legal recognition of ethically non-monogamous relationships. It seems to me that it is perfectly possible to do those things without endorsing Mormonism and its misogynistic style of polygamy.
It is certainly true that my family is different from my great-great-great-grandfather’s polygamous family, even if our having multiple partners is the same. I like to think that the defining difference is that my family is democratic and egalitarian. We’ve spent years talking and generating consensus around how we want to navigate future challenges we know we’ll have to handle. In my family, we feel it’s important that we all have financial independence. And we set up our own agreed-upon rules rather than following those handed down by a religion, a prophet, or even the larger community we live in. For now, all I can say is that it’s my family, and we are going to try and build it the best way we can.
And please, let me know if you have the number of a good lawyer who works with poly families in California.
Published Jan 5, 2022
Updated Apr 22, 2024
Published in Issue X: Clash of Ideologies
