Racheal Ray Show on Tuesday, June 28th Favorite Wife: Life After ... Being a Sister Wife (Polygamy) (425 hits)
A courageous former "sister wife" opens up about her incredible escape from life in a polygamist's home to Racheal Ray: For most girls, the teenage years are all about school and boys and dating, but for Susan, being a teen in a fundamentalist offshoot of the Mormon Church meant something completely different.
"Since I was a church girl," she explains, "I needed to marry a righteous man who could take me to that celestial kingdom." When she turned 15, Susan became the sixth wife of the prophet's 38-year-old brother, and gave birth to her first child 19 days shy of her 16th birthday. Over the next eight years, Susan had five more children while her husband continued to take other wives, who had more children of their own. The arrangement began to take its toll on Susan. "I could not come to grips with the fact that my husband wanted to marry other women when his wives were so lonely," she says.
Finally, Susan made the fateful decision to leave the community behind. She convinced her father to bring her and her children along on a business trip to Utah, where she turned to her brother. "I fell apart in his arms," she recalls. "And I just told him, 'I don't want to go back.'" Soon after, Susan started a new life in Utah, got a new job, went back to school, and fell in love. "For the first time in my life," she smiles, "I knew what it was like to be in a relationship with a man who was just mine, someone who made me feel special and secure and loved."
