On Sunday’s Tell-All episode of Sister Wives, Meri Brown opened up about the pain of having to watch her former husband Kody welcome children with her sister wives as Meri struggled to get pregnant herself.
As fans of ‘Sister Wives’ know, Meri was the first to marry Kody in 1990, though by the time she and Kody welcomed their only child, Leon (who is transgender and uses they/them pronouns), in 1995, Kody’s second and third wives, Janelle and Christine, had each already welcomed a child of their own with Kody.
Kody went on to welcome five more children with Janelle, five more children with Christine and years later, he and wife Robyn had two children of their own in addition to the three children Robyn had from a previous marriage, whom Kody adopted. As for Meri, she noted on the Season 20 Part 3 Tell-All that after becoming a mom in 1995, she “couldn’t have any more [kids].”
“There were definitely times in my life that I didn’t feel like anything that I could do was right,” Meri revealed to host Suki Krishnan. “Like, I couldn’t even have a baby.”
Meri admitted that watching her husband continue to father children with his other wives was “a huge challenge” for her, insisting it was more painful than seeing other women in her life have children.
“It’s one thing to watch my sisters or friends or whatever have babies when I want them,” she said. “It’s a whole other level to watch my husband have them with other people.”
While Meri said she didn’t think that her sister wives faulted her for having certain “feelings and emotions” regarding her fertility struggles, she also questioned “how empathetic they were” about her situation.
However, Robyn argued that she— as well as Janelle and Christine— made an effort to help Meri “feel supported” as the Brown Family continued to grow.
“There were special circumstances,” she explained to Suki. “Each of us would go and tell Meri when we were pregnant before we would tell anyone else, to help her be able to have the time to process that.”
(The Ashley would like to interject here that only Robyn got pregnant after she joined the family, to our knowledge. Christine was pregnant with Truly when Robyn came around, so Robyn would have no idea how Janelle and Christine handled telling Meri about their pregnancies.)
Robyn also reminded viewers that she once offered to be Meri’s surrogate in order to allow Kody and Meri to have a second child. (As longtime fans of ‘Sister Wives’ may recall, Robyn presented this idea to Meri on the show back in 2011, literally moments after giving birth to her and Kody’s son, Solomon.)
“I was trying to support that part of her, her pain and her story,” Robyn claimed on Sunday’s episode of her surrogacy suggestion.
In the family’s 2012 book Becoming Sister Wives, Meri touched on the topic of how devastated she was that she wasn’t able to have more than one child.
“My entire life I’d always wanted eight kids,” Meri wrote in the book. “…But once I had [Leon] my body didn’t want to give me any more children. Kody and I tried everything to help me conceive, from medical doctors to holistic healers and nothing worked. The most difficult thing for me was knowing that the fertility problem lay with me, not with Kody.
“Since Janelle and Christine got pregnant so often and so easily, it was clear that Kody had no problem fathering children. I struggled to come to terms with the fact that I was somehow defective,” Meri continued. “Kody never once made me feel bad for the fact that I wasn’t able to get pregnant again. Yet I sometimes couldn’t help but feel that my sister wives used their pregnancies to validate their marriages to Kody in a way I couldn’t. I know they never intentionally flaunted their fertility, but because I struggled so much with my infertility issues, I often wondered what place I had in the family.”
While addressing the emotional toll that came with her fertility struggles, Meri also revealed on Part 3 of the Tell-All that Kody and Janelle likely contributed to the “issues” she had in her plural marriage, even before Janelle officially joined the family.
“ … Kody and Janelle fail to recognize that possibly some of the issues that I had in polygamy could have stemmed from the fact that, oh, they wanted to get married on my birthday,” she revealed. “They had planned to get married on my birthday … .”
Meri credited Kody’s mom for being the one who intervened and ultimately prevented Kody and Janelle from tying the knot on her birthday, though she claimed that before the nuptials were changed, Kody and Janelle attempted to downplay their chosen wedding date by telling her that it didn’t matter if they got married on her birthday, as they would “just celebrate it a different day.”
“Like, excuse me, it does matter,” Meri said.
Meri also opened up on the Tell-All about Janelle’s transition from being her sister-in-law to her sister wife after previously being married to Meri’s brother Adam Barber for two years before becoming Kody’s second wife.
While the family had always glossed over Janelle’s first marriage to Meri’s brother, Meri finally revealed during the episode that the situation did bother her.
“I had emotions and I was the one who [was] in trouble for having these emotions,” Meri recalled. “We’re supposed to endure [polygamy] to the end and we’re supposed to live this way because this is what’s going to, you know, we’re going to gain salvation from it.”
Though Meri and Janelle both spoke (briefly) during the Tell-All about some of the disagreements they had after becoming sister wives, Meri previously complimented Janelle on an episode of ‘Sister Wives’ that aired in November, claiming that Janelle treated her kindly when she joined the family.
“I always felt like when Janelle got married, she was being really cool in the way that she was, like, including me and she didn’t want to hurt my feelings,” Meri stated, adding that Janelle’s actions during that time made her “feel very special.”
The four-part ‘Sister Wives’ Season 20 Tell-All concludes Sunday on TLC. Watch a clip from Part 3 of the Tell-All below.
(Photos: TLC; Instagram)
