Elissa Wall - Stolen Innocence - My story of growing up in a polygamous sect, becoming a teenage bride, and breaking free

Lines of priesthood authority are patriarchal and strictly observed. In this system all women and children basically belong to the priesthood—not just to their husband or father. In reality, they are possessions of the priesthood and the prophet, and revelations from God determine their ultimate fate. When the prophet decides to award a wife to a priesthood man, it is viewed as a transfer of a possession to the man. The prophet decides when two people should marry, when families can form, and when families that are not working are to be reorganized. From my earliest memories, I was taught that I should never do anything to go against the prophet and priesthood. Doing so would ultimately be going against God himself.

It was common practice to expel men, and in extreme cases women, whom the priesthood considered a threat and could weaken the faith of other members. It doesn’t take a religious ordinance or excommunication for a man to lose his priesthood. All that’s required is for the prophet or someone acting at his direction to say: “You have lost your priesthood.” The significance of this is enormous for believers, as it creates a culture of fear. If a husband loses his priesthood, his family is literally no longer his. In addition, he has to leave his land and home because his home is owned by the FLDS Church and controlled by the priesthood. Faithful wives and children will accept these decisions and wait to be reassigned to another man. In the meantime, the father is told that his only chance to win back his family is to leave and repent at a distance.

If men want to remain faithful members of the church and not lose their home and family, they must obey the priesthood’s rules and teachings in every facet of life. An important part of this responsibility is running a happy and obedient house hold. Because of the friction between Mother Audrey and my mom, it was no surprise that my father was apprehensive about the prophet getting involved in our family’s domestic issues. Men had been kicked out for far less serious problems, and it seemed only a matter of time before the difficulties at home would become apparent to the priesthood.

But even this risk was not too great to stop my mother from enlightening the prophet to our problems once she’d reached her limit. Mom had long ago learned that trying to fix problems herself wouldn’t change anything and she could no longer allow her children to be blamed for troubles in the home. Not long before the night we learned that my father would have a third wife, my mother had contacted the prophet, alerting him to the trouble in our house hold. This bold move was a huge violation for a woman, as it disrespected her husband and went against the church code of female behavior. Women are not supposed to complain; they are taught and expected to willingly and “sweetly” obey their husbands, who are their “priesthood heads.”

The fear of displeasing God and failing our religious responsibilities is so great that it pushes most members to do anything for the priesthood. For many women, this means they must sacrifice their own desires, needs, and feelings to conform to those of their husband and their religious beliefs. The FLDS believes that women cannot gain entrance to the highest of the three levels of heaven on their own; they must be married to a man who holds the priesthood and has at least three wives, or they will go to a lower level of heaven or to hell.

From birth, girls are prepared for this role. Their way of life is chosen for them by the priesthood. They are told whom to marry, what to believe, and how to live their lives. Women are taught that they have already chosen their destiny before their birth, at which point they chose to willingly place their lives in the hands of the prophet and priesthood, having everything dictated for them.

For my mother to alert the prophet without my father’s knowledge meant risking our chance of going to heaven together as a family, but things had gotten so bad in our home that my mother felt something needed to change.

When my father learned of my mother’s actions, he feared that he would never receive a third wife—or attain celestial marriage. But he held faith that the prophet would see him as the good man he was. He was well aware that men who prove unable to control their wives are looked upon as “weak sisters” and that he faced the possibility of losing his wives and his children to another man the prophet deemed more worthy.

So Dad was quite relieved several weeks later when he received a call from Rulon Jeffs, the prophet at the time. It seemed that Uncle Rulon had “another lady” for my father, and that my mother’s concerns had not jeopardized his standing after all. All my father’s worries were put to rest. Clearly, the prophet must have been confident that my father could handle his family issues.

My mother’s complaints may have been brushed aside, but there were reasons to be optimistic that another mother would bring stability into our home. The whole house seemed to light up at the mere prospect, and the two days after the announcement were consumed by a flurry of activity. All of the kids had fun rehearsing the musical presentation to welcome our new addition. Even my mother and Audrey seemed to put their differences aside as they began preparing for the wedding.

Dad had been assigned to marry Mom’s twenty-four-year-old niece, Laura Jessop. Laura’s father was married to two of my mother’s sisters and one of them was Laura’s mother. In the FLDS, it’s not uncommon for members of the same family—even sisters—to share a husband. Our family and the Jessops had been close for many years, but the choice of Laura was still a big surprise because we had been so closely tied to her growing up. It would be an adjustment to now call her “mother” instead of cousin.

The wedding was to take place at the prophet’s home in Salt Lake. Laura was driving up with her family from Hildale, Utah, home of an FLDS-only community. For years, Hildale and its sister town of Colorado City, Arizona, were called Short Creek, named after a stream that came out of the mountains and disappeared into the sand. Many of the locals just refer to the twin towns as “the crik,” and to the residents as “crikers.” Although these are not the proper spellings, residents of Short Creek long ago adopted these unusual pronunciations and spellings: “crik” and “criker.” Nestled close to the awe-inspiring red rock mountains of El Capitan and surrounded by hundreds of miles of parched, rough country, Short Creek was a refuge for members who wanted to practice their religion and plural marriage without the risk of persecution. Though barren and desertlike, the area’s rugged landscape and great expanses of open space offered scenic beauty and served as a buffer between the FLDS community and the outside world. The remote sites appealed to followers because they’d long been taught to be suspicious of all outsiders and to regard them as evil.

My family always stayed with the Jessops on the Utah side of Short Creek when we made the long drive south for church meetings and events. Likewise, the Jessops stayed with us in Salt Lake during visits to the prophet’s compound or as a pit stop on their way to visit their relatives in the FLDS-only community of Bountiful, British Columbia, just across the Canadian border. The community in Canada was much like the one in southern Utah in that its thousand or so members lived isolated from outsiders. Members of all three FLDS communities operated under the same umbrella of priesthood leadership and convened in Short Creek several times a year for important religious events and community activities.

Our mother, Laura Jessop, was fourteen years older than I was, and she and I had rarely spoken during our family visits. I was much friendlier with her three younger sisters, who were closer to my age. Still, I shared everyone’s optimism about Laura and hoped that her addition would mark a positive turning point for our family. Mom hoped for a friend in Laura. So did Mother Audrey. I just wanted the fighting in our house to stop and for us to all be a happy family.