Mykelti Brown recently revealed that she actually considered living plural marriage just like her parents— Christine and Kody Brown— and tried to encourage her husband Tony Padron to do so for the first years of their marriage.
During an interview last week with the Growing Up in Polygamy podcast Mykelti spoke about how she was open to the idea of polygamy after she and Tony got married in 2016. This is surprising because on ‘Sister Wives,’ Mykelti— as well as her other grown siblings— had been quite vocal about not wanting to live plural marriage.
“The first couple of years of our marriage, I wasn’t strictly opposed to polygamy,” she said. “I was like, ‘We could join. We could do polygamy.'”
In fact, Mykelti admitted that she had already picked out the women she’d like Tony to marry if they were going to live plural marriage.
“She was like, ‘Do you want Girl A or B? These are the only [choices] you get though. These are the ones I like,'” Tony stated.
“That’s true,” Mykelti said. “He’s not wrong.”
As ‘Sister Wives’ fans are aware, Mykelti’s father Kody already had two wives— Meri and Janelle— when he married Mykelti’s mother Christine. He went on to eventually marry a fourth wife, Robyn, who is currently the only woman still hitched to him.
Kody and his wives were part of the Apostolic United Brethren (AUD), a Mormon fundamentalist group that still practices polygamy.
Mykelti stated that she wasn’t interested in polygamy for religion reasons like her parents were, but instead, she wanted someone to share her family with.
“I didn’t want the religion of it. I wanted the bond of the sister wife… I was like, ‘I don’t want to do the religion because I can’t get down with the garments [you have to wear] and several of the other super crazy things I can’t get down with. But, a lot of the benefits of the sister wife, I was like, ‘Yeah, that would be beautiful.’… I see so many of the benefits of plural marriage itself, how helpful it is to have this woman bonded partner for life. You literally have your built-in best friend.
“That was the polygamy I came from, where, from the outside from what I saw, you have your best friend built into your family and their support system through everything,” she continued. “So I saw a lot of the benefits of polygamy growing up.
“I saw a lot of the downsides, too, so that’s why we chose not to do polygamy.”
Tony, however, denied that was the reason they remained monogamous.
“By the way, I said no,” he piped in, adding that he was never into the idea of having multiple wives.
“I just thought it was wild,” Tony said. “Back then, she was a lot more hopeful and rosy about [polygamy]. She did try to paint it like, ‘Oh it’s so cool.'”
Mykelti stated that she accepted that Tony would never be open to be a polygamist, but she did jokingly bring it up for the first couple of years of their marriage.
“I knew after he first said no it wasn’t going to happen,” she said.
Mykelti said she eventually realized that she would not have been happy living polygamy, as she is not submissive enough to make it work.
“We would not have been a successful polygamous family,” she said. “We would have been divorced already.”
Click here to listen to Mykelti and Tony’s full interview with the Growing Up in Polygamy podcast.
(Photos: TLC)
