Mom didn’t feel it would be appropriate to share many of the details with me, but her devastation was clear. This was the second time I had seen her crying like this, and memories of the day we left Craig on the side of the highway flooded my mind. Later, I would look back on this occasion and wonder whether Mom was crying solely out of love and regret for her sons’ pain or for the dual failure that the situation represented. A priesthood mother is expected to raise her children to be virtuous and good, and if a child strays, it is viewed as the mother’s fault. Mom was heartbroken enough to share her true feelings with me, and somehow I understood what that meant. I hadn’t yet finished the fifth grade, but it was in this bitter moment that I witnessed the continuation of my family’s unraveling.
In the end, it appeared Travis’s resentment of his circumstances at the reform retreat proved too great to endure. Shortly after we’d returned home from the April conference, we heard that he finally left Short Creek and moved into a house in southern Utah with some friends who had also left the church. Most were lost and searching for a way to make life work outside their religious upbringings. When I heard he was with them, I was pleased because it sounded like they’d formed a kind of family bond that would help them get through whatever rough times they would face. My parents, on the other hand, sensed that he was living with a bad crowd, but they could not access him and control his actions; Mom was consumed by worry—and Dad by frustration.
In early summer of 1997, our family was invited to join many of the Salt Lake members on an organized camping trip to Bear Lake, Wyoming, which would be one of just a handful of times that the people in Salt Lake organized their own community event. For much of my life, playing in the water had been off-limits because Dad felt it was too dangerous. On several occasions, I was told that the Devil controlled the water and swimming for pleasure would prevent the Lord from protecting us from him.
Because of this teaching, I was excited but also a little scared at the prospect of spending a few days at the lake. When I asked if the Devil would be in the water, I was told that because the prophet had approved of the trip the water would be blessed. This completely set my mind at ease, and upon our arrival, I splashed and played in the water in my long dresses to my heart’s content. At night we stayed in tents on the beach and the sound of water lulled us to sleep.
At one point during the festivities, my attention was drawn to another group of children in swimsuits frolicking in the water. They were not from the FLDS, but they too were with their families on vacation. Like a scientist, I paused to study them. I was curious because I had been taught that outsiders were evil, but at first glance they didn’t look that way to me. The longer that I looked at them, the more I came to realize that they looked nothing like I had imagined. Of course, I had seen non-FLDS strangers before—after all, we were a small minority in Salt Lake City. But I had never really studied them, to see how they acted and how they treated one another. These kids looked so nice. Sure, they were dressed in modern styles, but I found their clothes attractive as opposed to immodest. Secretly, I envied their bare legs, their sense of freedom, and the fun in their style. My ankle-length blue dress may have matched my blue eyes, but suddenly it no longer reflected how I felt inside.
As I watched them eat, laugh, and play with their families, I realized that those kids actually seemed similar to us, and that the only difference was their clothing. Even from far away, I could tell that there was love in this family’s eyes, that they cared for one another and would care about us too. I was young enough to still believe what I had been taught, simply because it was all I knew, but seeing that family gave me a shocking new point of view about the church’s teachings. I didn’t say anything to anyone. I kept it to myself.
Later on in life, I would realize that standing there and watching those kids was the first time I ever questioned FLDS teachings, even if it was only subconsciously.
Unfortunately for me, the excitement of our trip to Bear Lake was tainted by my chronic illness. My tonsils were so infected that they’d ruptured and infectious fluid was circulating through my system. My father finally realized that the severity of my situation required a visit to the doctor and was advised that surgery was in order. Doctors told my parents that I would need my tonsils and adenoids removed, as well as surgery to reconstruct my collapsed nasal passage.
Unaware of what was to come, I enjoyed all the attention I was receiving in the hospital. I had only been to the doctor a handful of times, once for a tetanus shot, another time for ear tubes, and another to treat my Lyme disease. I was given a gown to wear, and seeing my parents worrying over me made me feel cherished, like for that moment I was the only one of their children who mattered. Before my surgery, an anesthesiologist administered a shot to put me to sleep. It hurt so much, and I remember the burning sensation traveling up my arm. Suddenly, my arm went numb, and I drifted off to sleep.
When I awoke, it was a day and a half later. My parents had been keeping vigil at my bedside. Through an error, I’d been given an adult dose of anesthesia, and it had nearly cost me my life. I was told that at one point I had “coded” on the operating table. While I remembered waking up once and feeling as though I couldn’t breathe, I had no idea that my heart had actually stopped and I’d been rushed to a nearby children’s hospital for intervention. After all of that, my tonsils were never removed. My condition had been too grave to perform the surgery, and it would be weeks before another doctor would operate. In the days after I recovered consciousness, I suffered repeated mini- seizures that terrified my mother. True to form, my parents used this near-fatal accident as evidence for why we should avoid doctors and conventional medical care.
As my health slowly returned, our family settled into a routine, and at first it appeared that with Mother Audrey out of the picture, life would be more manageable. But in time it become obvious that, as long as there was more than one woman in the Wall home, the situation was unsustainable. Mother Laura was allowed to stay and continued to live in the house with her newborn son. Because it was her first child, Mother Laura seemed like a mother bear with a newborn cub. She wanted her space and decided that things in the house needed to be done her way. To make matters worse, she exerted a lot of influence over Dad, causing him to dole out punishments to my brothers Jacob, Justin, and Brad. All three boys were constantly in trouble with Mother Laura, who appeared to expect my father to prove his love by “correcting” their behavior.
Mother Audrey’s absence had done little to change the explosive atmosphere. In fact, things got even worse. From what I could see, Mother Laura used Audrey’s absence to extend her influence over the family, and suddenly what had once looked like a solution created a bigger fissure in our disjointed family. Even more bothersome was how paranoid and worried Dad had seemed to become. Losing his family had been devastating, and now with pressure from the priesthood to shape up our home, he was becoming stricter toward my siblings in an attempt to regain his tentative grasp on all of us. My mother was no exception, and she too was under constant surveillance. Worried that she would again go to the prophet, Dad grew anxious each time he saw her talking on the phone, and eventually it got to the point where she could only talk to Rachel and Kassandra when he was not around.
That September, I was back at Alta Academy, entering the sixth grade, but by then the school had become yet another source of unhappiness. For many years, Warren Jeffs had been teaching that boys and girls shouldn’t associate; as I had learned back in the second grade, we were to treat each other as “snakes.” But this year, his teachings became increasingly rigid, and he decided to physically separate the two sexes into different classrooms and different buildings on the compound. The curriculum for the sixth-grade girls’ class was wholly unlike