I was raised by my mother and grandmother. My father was an accident that happened to my mother on a cruise when she was seventeen and my father was never in the picture. I grew up as the only child and attended a nice private preparatory school and was accepted to college to study English. My college roommate came from the Utah and we were quite different. I was modest about most everything, I kept me to myself and didn't speak about my family's condition, which was quite well off. My roommate was there on a scholarship and she came from a large family of eleven kids. She said they were Mormons but of a different sect. I didn't know anything about Mormons so I just accepted what she said.

All she wanted to do was get married and have kids. She had no ambition to work or do anything else. Being at college was just postponing her goal in life. The man waiting for her had insisted on her attending college since she had gotten the scholarship. Little by little things came out. I wasn't able to put my curiosity aside, the more I asked the more she told me. Her family lived in a small community and they weren't mainstream Mormons, there were plural household in their community. All the wives had loads of kids. She had pictures of her mother and of all of her brothers and sisters. She told me about the meal time, about bed time, about homework time, about chores, about her father and about her mother. Her mother was her role model and she wanted to be a wife so bad that is all she could talk about.

In my junior year she invited me to go spend a couple of weeks with her. Her house was crazy. She had gone to college but still there were eleven kids still at home, a new baby had been added in the last year. In the morning when we woke up she had two sisters in bed with her. She gave me a sister to sleep with me. All day, every day was a loud disorganized day, laundry day was huge, there were two washers in the house and two dryers. The refrigerator was enormous and there were two more in the garage. Clothes didn't seem to have an owner, if it fit someone they wore it. Her mothers had two rooms, but they were always filled with kids. I was hugged and kissed by so many faces. Other than the first night I didn't sleep alone, I had one or two or three kids in bed with me.

When I went back home for the rest of the summer my room felt so quiet and empty and my bed was so cold. When we got back to school for our senior year I hugged her so much, I asked about all of her brothers and sisters and her mom and dad. That semester passed fast, I went out to her home for Thanksgiving and met her intended husband. He was a nice enough man, mid thirties but he lived with his older sister and her four kids. We were best friends and he was nice to me and told me I was always welcome. In my last semester I asked her if I could go with her. If she would take me with her. I was desperate. I had to go out again and we had these long meetings, long nights of talking. I wasn't Mormon, I would be the first non-Mormon to live in the community. I spent a lot of time with her mom. I got the other story, the work side of the story, the church side of the story. Was I prepared to accept that Chris was going to be his wife? to follow their teachings, to accept her husband, to release her to have children, because that is what marriage was about.

She got married as she planned. She became pregnant pretty much as soon as she got married. Although I was accepted as a friend of the family by his older sister, she wasn't convinced of me. She had looked forward to Chris coming home, but I wasn't part of her plans. I never felt I was part of the family. It was hard. Kids were all around us, Chris was having her four kids, one, two, three and four. I had a hard time with some of the teachings, I was totally in sync with Chris, we were on the same level and we were doing the same thing. But Chris' sister in law never warmed up to me and told me many times that I wasn't one of them.

In the end, after ten years of living in Utah I went back to my family and went back to live near my mother and grandmother. For four years Chris and her kids shuttled back and forth between the East Coast and Utah. The long separations from Chris were painful and lonely. In late 1999 Chris' husband passed away unexpectedly and she and her kids came to live with me. We were free to be together, I had always felt that we were married in our hearts. We had four kids to finish raising, the older ones were getting ready for college. I was fortunate that my family's financial condition was able to absorb us.

When it was legal Chris and I got married. This time properly married.