Read an Excerpt
Preface
In Escape, the memoir I published in October 2007, I told the story of my dramatic, middle-of-the-night flight from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the Mormon polygamous cult that I’d been born into thirty-five years earlier. I was elated when Escape was published, staggered when it went as high a number two on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and utterly convinced that that was the end of the story. My children and I were enjoying our freedom and flourishing in our new lives.
Then on April 3, 2008, I abruptly collided with the past I thought I’d put so firmly behind us. That’s the date when law enforcement officers representing the state of Texas, acting on a telephone tip from a girl calling herself Sarah Barlow, surrounded the FLDS compound near Eldorado, Texas. That dramatic night was the beginning of months of upheaval in my life unlike any I had experienced while escaping from the cult.
The raid was shocking, alarming, yet it also filled me with hope. Perhaps, I thought, the crimes committed by the FLDS against its women and children would finally be revealed to the rest of the world.
Like the millions of Americans who watched the crisis play out on television, I was sickened when I saw the faces of the children being removed from the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch. I shuddered to imagine the fear and trauma they must have been feeling as they left the only world they had ever known. But even as I viewed the same dramatic footage as everyone else, I saw it from a unique perspective because I was intimately familiar with the major players. For seventeen years I had been married to Merril Jessop, the FLDS leader who was running the YFZ Ranch. When I was eighteen, I was forced to marry him, a man thirty-two years my senior, as the price I had to pay before I could go to college. We had never even spoken to each other. I became his fourth wife, and we had eight children in fifteen years.
We lived in Colorado City, Arizona ( just across the border with Utah), in an FLDS community of ten thousand people. I fled before Merril relocated to the compound in Texas, which had been built for the sect’s most elite members. I’d heard Warren Jeffs, the “prophet” of the FLDS, talk about moving his followers to “The Center Place.” I knew it would be an isolated enclave cut off from the rest of the world, and I was sure that if my family were ever forced to live in such a place, I would never be able to protect my children from the radical extremism that Jeffs preached. That was just one motivation among many for my desperate desire to get out.
But even though I fled the FLDS, I never stopped loving my stepchildren. I had reason to believe that at least eight of them were on the YFZ Ranch, and my heart was torn apart by what they might be going through. I also realized that if I hadn’t escaped, I could easily have been one of the distraught FLDS mothers crying on TV. I knew many of the women who were being interviewed. Some were good mothers who loved their children but were trapped in a world of systematic degradation, exploitation, and abuse.
With so many people I cared about involved, I started working behind the scenes with the authorities to help them understand the religious culture they were dealing with. I tried to help the dedicated child-care advocates who were suddenly struggling to care for and cope with hundreds of FLDS children who’d been separated from their mothers.
I’ve written Triumph to tell what I know about what went right—and what went terribly wrong—with the raid in Texas.
But I also wrote Triumph to explain why I was able to break through the crippling and destructive elements of the FLDS mind control into which I’d been indoctrinated since birth. I have been asked over and over, “What made you different? Where did you find the determination to get yourself out with all your children? How did you hold on to your courage?”
Just recently I was in Texas to testify in one of the criminal trials resulting from the Texas raid. I met a woman who’d left the FLDS rather than be forced into a second marriage with a man she abhorred. She had no children, so she had only herself to get to safety. Yet she told me how hard it had been for her and how overwhelmed she’d been with fear and doubt when she first got out. She questioned everything about her decision. “I even questioned if I was turning against God,” she confided. “I had so many, many questions. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I’d had crying children, begging me to allow them to return.”
She was right—it was hard, at times almost crushingly so. But I can honestly say I never looked back after I made it to safety. I never questioned myself or wondered if I did the right thing. I had periods of confusion about where I was going in my life and how I would get there. Living in a homeless shelter for a time with my eight children—one of whom is profoundly disabled—was one of the most difficult challenges I encountered. But I never doubted that I’d done the right thing; nor did I feel guilty about leaving the FLDS.
The woman I met in Texas had left the FLDS suddenly, when an opportune moment presented itself. So she faced a host of massive changes all at once. That’s sometimes the way transformation happens.
But my message in Triumph is about how you can transform your life in simple, gradual, and consistent ways, especially when you don’t have money, support, or a guarantee that you can get where you’re trying to go.
I did not completely change the way I viewed my world in one moment. My shedding of decades of FLDS mind control came in stages. Looking back now, I can see that I was transforming my life years before I fled. It happened incrementally. Sometimes it was a day at a time, sometimes just an hour. But each moment was a building block that led me to the next stage in my journey, and then the next. Working gradually helped me amass the psychological and emotional strength I needed to trust myself. (About the need to keep my children safe, I had no doubts whatsoever.)
We live in a culture where everything happens so fast that we often forget that our lives do not—and usually cannot—transform themselves overnight. In my life there were no quick fixes. My experience was traumatic, but the tools I used are available to anyone who wants to find a new and better direction.
I hope no one reading Triumph will ever be in a situation as desperate as mine. I lived in a world that was so rigidly controlled that if I had been caught reading a book like this one, it would have been confiscated and destroyed. I would have been punished for having contact with the evil outside world. My life in the FLDS was so extreme and dangerous that when I decided to leave, I had no margin for error. Each choice and every strategy I pursued had to be careful and deliberate.
But at some point nearly everyone, no matter what her situation, has to face change that is terrifying and overwhelming. I had virtually no money (I left with twenty dollars in my wallet), but I radically changed my life through a series of ordinary steps that anyone can take. What worked for me can serve as a guide for others.
Change is often so frightening that we resist, deny, and run away from what we know we need to do, deadening ourselves to other possibilities. It’s not easy to tackle our monsters and confront our fears. When I fled from the FLDS with my eight children, it was like leaping off a cliff. I had no idea where we would land or what might happen to us. Survival was my primary goal. But I did more than survive: my life with my family became a triumph. It is by no means perfect; my heart aches for my daughter Betty, who returned to the FLDS two days after turning eighteen. But I am filled with gratitude and the wisdom that I have worked so hard to earn.
As I’ve crisscrossed the country over the past few years promoting Escape, the question I get asked more than any other is “How did you do it?” It’s not just women who want to know. Men also show up at my readings and events, and they too shake their heads and ask the same question.
The questions got me pondering: What were the tools of my transformation? My path was never sure, but I feel I now have some answers. I’d like to share them with you. May my triumph help create yours.
