I was born in the year of 1986 in the Salt Lake City, Utah area. My parents followed and were a part of a religious polygamy cult named the Fundamentalist Church of Ladder Day Saint, or better known as the FLDS. Most members of the cult lived in a small town they call Short Creek, on the Utah Arizona border.

My father had two wives. We called them Mother Karen, and Mother Marsha. Mother Karen was my birth mother. I was the seventh child of twenty children. We were required to ensue their very strict rules. No television, no radio, no public schools, no communication with anyone outside the religion. We were also required to wear long dresses, with long sleeves. It was considered immoral for a girl to talk to or look at another boy, unless …show more content…
We had a trampoline, I would take great pleasure just laying on it at night and feeling the cool breeze blow through my hair while I would stare up into the dark sky and just watch the twinkling stars. Sometimes we would even stay up late at night to play cops and robbers in the dark, it's such an entertaining game to play with so many kids. We had bikes and what seemed like never ending concrete paths throughout the yard to ride on. We had gardens and lots of fruit trees. We had brown chickens that would lay the most beautiful green eggs, ducks that would hatch precious yellow ducklings, turkeys that would gobble back at you if you gobbled at them or made any kind of roaring sound, soft, wooly lambs, a grey cat with velvety smooth fur, and a dog named Erma.

Erma was a pure Border Collie dog. We taught her how to sit, shake our hands and roll over. She was brilliant, wise, and protective of us. If any of the children ever got hurt she would curl up by the distraught child and stay with them until they were content again. We liked to trick her sometimes too. We would go on the swings until we felt like we were soaring as high as the planes and then jump out of the swing and pretend we fell out. She would come running and nuzzle her wet nose on your …show more content…
One day Mother had just disappeared, no one could get a hold of her. I was so worried, I was the oldest one in the house at the time because all my older sibling had already been married. I put all my siblings to bed, then just stayed up waiting, I already knew what had happened, they were going to make her marry someone else. Sure enough, around midnight, my mother finally showed up and she was not alone. She had been married to a man who already had 6 wives. The next day was my 18th birthday. We spent the day packing and moving into a him with this other mans family. We were told to call him Father, and that he was our father now. They expected us to just completely forget about my real