Kody Brown is not sure how his family’s polygamous approach will survive in the future.
During this week’s episode of Sister Wives, Kody candidly shared how he’s struggling to adjust to life post-divorce. In the previous episode, his third wife, Christine Brown, told fellow sister wives Meri Brown, Janelle Brown and Robyn Brown that she is leaving Kody. (She publicly announced the breakup news in November 2021 after 25 years of marriage.)
“My life is in a form of limbo because Christine’s leaving, and I don’t know what that looks like,” Kody, 53, said in a confessional.
“I’ve been sort of in the anger phase of divorce, and so I’ve not been addressing it very well,” he continued. “I guess this construction project [on the family’s Coyote Pass property] with Janelle and Pete [is] kind of one of those things to get my mind off the divorce frustration. But dude, I am in the anger phase and every once in a while, I just get tied up in knots over Christine leaving.”
Kody is only legally married to Robyn, 43. But he has considered himself to be spiritually married to his other wives, even though Kody’s relationship with Meri, 51, has become more platonic over time.
Christine’s departure from the polygamous marriage has already caused turmoil for the Brown family. However, later in the episode, most of the bunch came together to attend a graduation party for Christine’s daughter Ysabel despite that. (The event occurred two weeks after Christine told the wives of her separation from Kody, and she hadn’t spoken to any of the women since that conversation.)
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According to Christine, the party “might be one of the last times we get together,” especially as she plans to move back to Utah. But given the circumstance, Robyn admitted she was “a little bit nervous” to go to the event out of fear that the family would struggle to “be normal and natural and comfortable” around each other.
Fortunately for everyone, the kids, in particular, enjoyed themselves at Ysabel’s graduation party. But Kody admitted he still can’t remove himself from a “cloud of sadness,” saying it’s “because of the nuance of a breakup.”
“I don’t know what this is going to lead to,” he said in a confessional. “I don’t know what else is going to go on.”
Kody also recognized that he’s “not in a good place” with many of his children either, saying he has “strained relationships” with some of them. While he isn’t “trying to be angry or hold them accountable” for where things are, he said he does feel as if he doesn’t have the “respect” he believes he deserves from his children.
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“No, I’m not okay,” he said. “I’m in a funk. It’s kind of this loneliness combined with a bitterness with the entire family.”
Kody then admitted that he’s “living in a delusional world where I’m wishing Christine wouldn’t leave” and hoping that he could “maintain some quasi-family relationship” with his ex-wife as well as their daughter Ysabel, who is moving to North Carolina after graduation to attend college. She will live with Janelle’s daughter, Maddie (Brown) Brush, and her husband, Caleb Brush. The Brown family patriarch also acknowledged he’s now “struggling with sort of a state of regret.”
“It’s a weird thing to be getting left,” he continued. “It’s made me question getting into plural marriage. It’s made me question my faith and especially question religion. The message that we had to the world about functional polygamy seems so dysfunctional now.”
Kody’s three remaining wives also questioned how Christine’s departure would ultimately impact the family’s future — and some of them took it a step further, wondering why Christine would leave in the first place.
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“How is this wrong? How does this not work for everybody?” Robyn said in a confessional. “Why isn’t this something worth fighting for? Why isn’t this something worth staying for?”
“Why can’t we work on the things that we need to work on between each other? We’re not doing justice to our family, and we’re not doing justice to Ariella and Solomon and Truley, these little ones who really need to have that security of family,” Meri told the cameras as Janelle added in a separate confessional, “It feels like there’s storms brewing in the family. I don’t know what they mean, I don’t know what the outcome will be. I personally am not very optimistic that we’ll see many days like this [party going forward].”
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
