Roslyn

Yes, Meri is definitely "processing" in her head at those times. She also has some of that classic foot action going that she showed during the whole season when the catfish was going on in real time. I don't think that the other wives really think about what they are discussing might be hurting Meri, just because Meri does only think about "wooa is me". I'm sure Meri is listening to them bubble about Caleb and their new found like in Tony, but Meri is just "oh, I'll never feel this joy with my daughter" kind of thing, instead of being able to step outside her world and feel happiness for them. Janelle is easy to figure out, her thinking process is way too slow for her to be very pokerfaced. She has adopted the blank stare to pretty much cover up any reactions besides that odd giddyness that she sometimes shows, it came out loud and clear during the cake testing. Christine is Christine, I think we see her as she truly is, her emotions are right there in her face, her body and the things that just fall from her mouth with zero filter. Robyn....well....she understands a LOT about body language I believe and has developed that clenched jaw poker face that resembles what I see people calling a "resting bitch face", but I think that is her purposefully making her face emotionless. I also know that body stance very well. I was a painfully shy child and an introvert bordering on hermit as an adult. I have my own dealings with anxiety and depression and PTSD issues and one of my first "tells" is going very still. Only my daughter and son can recognize it, my husband of 26 years still struggles with my anxiety issues and being able to recognize or have empathy for it.

I think this is a key phrase! We do know who smacked her down. Kody. She has stated that she knows what she wants and doesn't have a problem verbalizing her opinion and exactly how she feels. She uses this as an excuse as to why she was abusive to Janelle when Janelle entered the family. The only real instances we have to be an example is that Janelle like to wash dishes in the morning and Meri liked to wash them before bed. They got up at different times (Janelle early/Meri late) and their personal laundry habits clashed. I'm sure there were more, but that is all they have really said either on the show or in their book. So...early on she is "open and honest" about her housekeeping demands and takes it out in the snippy bitchy way that we have seen her behave. Quiet Janelle doesn't have skills to stand her ground and Meri is the bully. Looking backwards in time it's easy to see that Kody should have done what a good Principle man would do. Stand up and set rules and boundaries, but he's a Narcissistic Showboat who lacks any kind of leadership skills and thinks that he plays no role in the women's emotional and mental well being. Their family foundation was built with the wrong materials with shoddy construction. Her religion teaches that women must obey and please their husbands on this worldly plane to earn their way into the highest of the Celestial Kingdoms. She wants what she wants, she wants things done her way, with respect always paid to her feelings, but the trump card is Kody. He's the same, he only wants "fun" with none of those emotional downers the women bring. So Meri's wants are bulldozed by Kody. It was very apparent in the language and body language with the Kody/Robyn/Meri talk at the wet bar in this episode. Kody barked that he will NOT sit on the couch (where they have had other catfish talks with Nancy) and they will sit at the wet bar. Meri immediately states she "isn't comfortable" sitting at the wet bar (where she is forced to be face to face with Kody), when he insists... her body language is telling. She rolls her shoulders like a chastised child and starts to repeat over and over, "okay, this is where Kody wants to sit, Kody wants this, Kody wants to sit here" in near hysteria. While we have to take the things that the catfish says with a grain of salt, there was one telling thing where Meri said something along the lines that "she knows all too well how it feels to be compared to everyone else". I think that is a small opening of something much bigger. I think it means that over her marriage Kody has openly compared her to the other wives. I can see him doing it all too well, especially with their religious doctrine that insists on the absolute "sweetness" of women.

Meri can't sit facing Kody. THAT was what it was about. She immediately turned herself in the chair, facing Robyn...NOT Kody. She then turned her head as far as she could with her hair in her face (blocking her face from the cameras). She doesn't want the camera face on to catch her facial expressions/emotion etc, and she does NOT want to face Kody's cold caveman eyes boring into her. Meri is about Meri. Every subject is about Meri's perception and "feelings" about that subject. However it's the same with Kody. Every subject comes back to him, his perception, how it aligns with his beliefs. Since Kody and Meri are only talking about their own perceptions of Every. Single. Subject. Neither one of them can look at 1.)the subject as a whole or 2.) the other persons perception. It's a constant battle of the sames, THAT is why Robyn fits in the interpreter role. She has the ability to see Kody's point of view, she can see Meri's point of view and since both people will listen to Robyn, that is why they really need her between them constantly. It's also why Kody insists on only talking "deep talks" with Meri when they are with Nancy the Wonder Therapist.

Yes, I'm thinking this too. A long time ago people talked about how they might get paid "per episode". So you figure that two hour slot is one episode. Instead of making, say, three episodes in the 30 minute slot they pack it all into a 2 hour megathon. Browns get paid technically less and they fill more time on screen with their footage. Downsizing.

Robyns VERY famous "Purity Speech"....cliff notes version... During their In House Church gathering Robyn got up and told a bizarrely cryptic tale sort of in the third person. But it was her Cautionary Tale of "Don't just Give Away your Virginity Girls". Naturally all actual words of sex, virgin, horny etc were all cryptic, using other words. She held this odd thing in her hand, a heart shaped something that looked like a large locket because the lid opened (it fit in the palm of her hand). She told the story of a girl who didn't "cherish her purity" and "gave her purity to a boy "who begged for it"". BUT!! That boy didn't honor her purity (then she throws the heart locket thing on the floor) That boy broke her purity!! And then she picks up the broken purity locket and holds it out to Kody (sitting next to her on a chair throne) and says how if you choose the RIGHT boy to "give your purity to" then he will cherish it, and it will be his and HE is the right person for you. Yea...that's close enough. It was a very very skeevey thing to watch on telly, let me tell you. ALL the kids are sitting there, even the little ones, and worse yet...her three children from her first marriage were sitting there AND it is THEIR father that she is talking about. That moment when "she gave it up" to the boy who begged for it was nothing more than two people hot for each other...and yes, she conceived her beloved son Dayton from that pre-wedded bliss, yet then talks about it as this giant mistake. It wasn't too big of a mistake because she then went on to marry and have two more children. Those children should NEVER have to even think (no matter how hidden and cryptic) that they might have been mistakes as well just because she is now rewriting their history into Kody's history(and that might have been worse than the whole purity thing!)

The recent episodes are two hours long (with commercials) and I guess the third hour is the clip shows people talk about. My amazon account only gives me the episode commercial free thankfully so its 1 hour and 25 minutes of actual viewing time. The clip shows are just that, they don't come through the amazon listing thankfully. These past few shows have had more new content then the usual ones that were rerun scenes mixed with a sprinkling of new.

Well, I watch the show via amazon, so I can't see it until the next day. I usually buzz through the real time conversations before bed and last night I popped over to their facebook page to amuse myself with the comments. It was about 50/50 between sympathy for Meri or sympathy for Mariah or even outright rage that Mariah could possibly treat her mother this way. Well. After watching for myself today I didn't see Mariah treating Meri badly at all. About the only thing she did that was a touch shitty was with a passive aggressive stance...say nothing, which would leave long pauses (uncomfortable ones) and Meri falls right into that trap and really stupid things just fall from her mouth to fill the silence. First when Meri said "weird" I think she WAS talking about Mariah and she quickly corrected herself when she realized it was offensive, repeating over and over how "weird" was for HER feelings. You know how we have compared Kody to Michael Scott?? Well, it was Meri's turn to take on the Michael Scott parallel for a moment. When she was sitting there...completely unable to "picture in her mind" how on earth a lesbian woman could POSSIBLY have a child...all I could think of was we need Dwight Schrute to pull up next to her with a laptop and pull up a few video websites to show her. I agree with others...MERI was looking into invetro not all that long ago...just DUH!!?? What I honestly think...and I am just judging on what her facial expression was...is that she was picturing her daughter being intimate with a woman and was skeeved by it. THAT is what that expression was to me. Okay...their conversation from a different point of view. I personally have "one of those mothers" Think...Mommie Dearest for a moment. By the time I was 18 I was filled with rage and so when I was having conversations with my mother I'm sure that someone who had no clue of my past would think I was a nasty, bitchy brat who wasn't "grateful" for my mother. What I see between Meri and Mariah is that there is something ELSE going on. Something we haven't been shown. Something beyond the catfish. What we DO know is that Meri is stuck in a child like mind state. Mariah was HERS, and her ONLY possession that she had as a young plig woman. She had to share everything, but Mariah was hers. Sure, they all sit on camera and claim that "all the kids are ours", but we see otherwise from our seats in the audience over the years. They moved to Lehi when Mariah was in the 10-ish range and so then, when Kody was spending time with Meri...it was one on one with his daughter. I think that cemented that very close relationship he has with Mariah and doesn't seem to have with any other of the girls. Every time he was with Christine it was a gaggle of kids...same with Janelle, but with the boys he favors. His time with Meri was time with Mariah as an only child. And it shows. Mariah is Daddy's little girl. I'll go out on a limb and take a leap...I will guess that Meri had SOMETHING deep happen in the age 9-12 range. When she talks in the single TH segments. She talks slow (because she has to think every little word). She also has that odd dip her head, give a little "I know something you don't know" look, and her lips press together as she talks. In that moment she morphs into a child, and speaks and thinks like a child. Other people have noted that Robyn and Kody talk to her like she's a child. She gets stuck on just one me...me...me...me...me over and over and can't seem to move forward from HER feelings, HER needs etc. When talking to the Darger wives about how she must have her own kitchen and "do her own decorating!?" the look on her face was "WHAT....my BELIEFS have to come BEFORE my ability to decorate my OWN kitchen!!??" The age 9-12 is an irritating age. Kids want to be as independent as a 17 year old, but don't have the ability to reason out things to get that level of independence yet. They also think the world is all about them and by the teen years the drama can quickly get overwhelming. Kids that age also lack the ability to recognize body language and facial expression like a late teen to early 20 young adult. Meri uses other people to "buffer" when things get "hard". Just like a kid doesn't want to approach Dad with something that they think he won't react well, so they go to Mom and use her as a go between. Meri did this with Mariah when she was young. Mariah became Meri's security, her bestest friend, her confidant. So when Mariah is leaving for college, Meri is losing her bestie....AND her buffer. We've seen her use the little kids to buffer, even just the last week when she had to hold the baby physically between herself and Robyn to "discuss her trip". AND WHY didn't she even feel the need to ever mention it to Christine and Janelle....do they not count?? HHmmmm Meri is stuck....emotionally stuck. Something in her life stunted her, she brought up "building a wall" when she feels rejected. Hmmm. She wasn't born into a polygamous family like Christine. Her parents converted "when she was young". How young? From the get go in the marriage she made demands that things are done because of her way, her feelings. She is (was) the legal wife and so if Kody gets other wives SHE gets equal money and NO PDA to look at...because of her jealous feelings. Mariah is growing up. Maturing into a young woman with feelings, needs and opinions of her own. She has grown away from her emotional clinging mother. She has stated, in a mature way that she needs space from Meri always demanding to talk about how Mariah "feels" towards Meri. Meri can't wrap her head around it, because she isn't at the same emotional maturity that her daughter is. Robyn speaks to her like a child....because Meri is very childlike. They need to just put Meri into real therapy and they could probably all stop the group sessions entirely. OH!!! AND....even Nancy TOLD them to STOP digging at each other on camera. And there it was....at the beginning of the show, when Kody was talking about their trip and Meri (dripping sarcasm) blurted out "OH...we can all live in the same HOUSE again!" The look on Kody's face was priceless.

a quote from that article... "“When I had Mariah, I had this cute little girl. I just always expected that she would grow up, meet a guy, get married, have kids,” she said in a confessional sneak peek from Sunday’s episode. “I always wanted to have a son. I always just kind of thought, ‘Well, ya know, since I never had a son, I’ll be able to kind of adopt Mariah’s husband into kind of being a son.’ And I looked forward to seeing who that was gonna be, you know? And that’s not gonna happen.”" Yes, Meri made if very apparent how much she wanted a son when she was in a couch session talking about Mariah's birth. She made the comment that Kody mistook the umbilical cord for male genitalia and he was excited it was a boy...however Meri stated that yes, it was "...just a girl" I've always wondered how Mariah felt about that very public statement. I know from personal experience, my mother favored my brother openly and when I also had two children, one male and one female she also openly favored my son over my daughter. It might seem trivial, but the burn really sticks with you.

Yes, there are others, CofCinci posted above a link that has the "etched Sam" photo. I think of them all (relatively tame graphic wise) the photo where she actually etched his name long enough and hard enough into the skin of her arm to make it that pronounced and red shows all too well that Meri was a willing participant in the relationship. And that she wasn't necessarily thinking with the rational part of her brain either. It matches up with the groveling voice mails with "oh....Bbaaaby, I'm soooory" that she sent over and over.

Well...I really hated the assigned color of yellow on my "R" profile. So, a few clicks with Paint and I have a "new and improved" R :D

Yup. I found it for just under $200 at a vending machine company. Maybe it came from the friendly pawn shop??

It seems to be a Rocket Ship shaped GumBall machine.

Yes, trying to understand the "why" can pull you down the same path the catfish is on. My daughter lost an entire summer to gathering evidence and trying to understand the whole thing. We talked with another local family who was caught up with this girl when she was 13/14. At that time it was mostly her in person attention seeking, texting that she was going to take pills, or had taken pills. Texting people she knew, their parents and anyone she could get a phone number for. Phone calls and "desperate" sounding messages on answering machines. My daughter met her through other friends at school when she was 16-ish and by that time she was online, doing the same things. According to the school (big brick wall dealing with them) this girl did or does have an illness that kept her home from school a lot. But according to the girl she had many many illnesses with many treatments and death at any moment kind of things. Yet anytime that anyone saw her, she never seemed or looked sick. By the end we were wondering if she truly had any illness at all. And after meeting her mother, well, she seemed to be in her own world as well. When you read about people faking illness and getting a lot of sympathy etc you can see in this girl where it comes from. Reading about JO's past victims and they all bring in the fact that illnesses and treatments were always part of the whole storyline as well. The meeting between Cheryl and Meri brought up that "Sam" stated he had leukemia...and then the "Lindsay" persona had colon cancer. GGaaaa!! This whole thing has me nuts sometimes. There are so many lies to sift through, but there are tidbits of truth within them. If it were just lies and lies it would be easy to walk away, because there is no substance. It's those tidbits that keep people going, the pieces to the whole puzzle. I honestly think that JO has us all as her "marks". She has catfished America.

Fair warning...once you see the banana photo, you can NOT unsee it. A google search of "meri catfish banana image" will bring it up, I believe it's the All About the Tea site that has it memorialized... The premise behind the image was "Sam" and Meri were having a morning text conversation when they discovered they were both eating a banana at the same time. While the catfish insists that the conversation was ONLY about them comparing the size of their bananas Meri does at one point state "I thought you said yours was big". The catfish INSISTS this was only about the banana, but most people reading it saw it for what it was. A playful innuendo where Meri was comparing her banana to "Sams" ....um.....well. You know. Also remember at this time in their relationship "Sam" was openly insisting that "he" and Meri had physically and in person consummated their relationship. If that were the case she would already know the exact size, and shape...of...you know. This was a major mistake the catfish made when "he" posted that conversation and photos. Two photos were sent from Meri. One of her banana and the other of her....enjoying...her banana. You can NOT unsee that photo, trust me.

Oh I think it's safe to say that JO is delusional and has been for a very long time. When the catfish stuff with Meri came out I remember skimming Nick's blog and understanding that she (JO) has been doing this for a very long time. She found her "MO" with the handsome rich man as bait and the role of plucky sidekick for herself and just started to reel them in (so to speak) I remember reading about the woman who was at the heart of the beginning of what we all now call "catfishing". The original movie following Nev and his online relationship that turned out to be not just a lie, but a complex web of many lies all leading back to one lonely woman. It was an interview with her husband, who struggled to understand what his wife had truly done who coined the phrase "Catfish" as we now understand it, even though this behavior dates back to the beginning of the internet I'm sure. She was outed on film for everyone to see, she openly admitted to doing what she did, but yet when the cameras were gone she fell back into her desire to go online and be someone else, it became an obsession with her. I have also read where lots of people are shocked that someone can do this. That one person can create so many multiple accounts over so many social media platforms and get away with harassment of so many people. Yes. One person can do this. I never doubted it because I saw it for myself. Some years ago when my daughter was in high school she and her friends became the online target of a very mentally sick and delusional girl. By the time my daughter finally told me what was going on (about 6 months into it) and sat me in front of her computer...well...I sat there with my mouth hanging open as she started showing me all the different "profiles" that this girl had created to a.) show love and support to herself online and b.) to harass others AND make it look like these girls were harassing HER online. It was quickly clear to me that this was the same girl. She couldn't hide her writing style. In fact, when I read the crap that JO put on the batman blog I was shocked at the similarities in writing style. Endless words saying nothing, bizarre sentence structure, gaslighting and then all the fake people created to comment and come in to make the real person look more real (?) I told her to screen shot and save everything, and she filled four large flashdrives of evidence. She met face to face with the girl and her parents, calling her out and showing her evidence. That got her a whole week before it just started up again. In the end my daughter became a very good online computer detective and we were at the stage of taking everything to the police to try to get it to stop. In the initial interview my daughter decided not to go any further. She said that she needed to focus on her school work and she wanted her life back. She deleted everything she had on those social media platforms, but she saved the evidence just in case (I still have it) and she moved on quite happily. She is now a Junior in university and is happy and settled. While visiting a friend over the holidays she learned that this girl is still living at home and still on the computer making up people and stories. It's sad, but there are people out there like this. I always wondered if JO doesn't have one of those rooms like you see on Law & Order shows. Where the walls are covered with all the information she has compiled for her characters and her "marks" to keep the stories and photos and timelines straight.

http://people.com/tv/sister-wives-star-mariah-brown-reveals-she-became-a-homophobe-to-compensate-conflicted-feelings-being-gay/?xid=socialflow_twitter_peoplemag&xid=socialflow_twitter_peoplemag I was cruising the twitter feed at CJs blog and this people magazine article is all through it. Mariah speaks a little more about her coming to accept her sexuality. It may be also why she has always been the child who threw herself into religious studies more than the others.

No, I remember him. His dark and dead eyes creep me out! He was the one on the show that runs his household like a military base and is very much in control. I remember Meri getting giddy over his well organized control..um...leadership of his family. Saying something along the lines of "I could be married to him..." I finally googled...the one I'm thinking of is Nathan Collier. After the gay marriage passed nationally he came out and said that he wanted a second marriage license for his second wife. If homosexuals can legally marry he wanted to legally marry two women.

I remember watching the show with Brady. This guy was one of the ones that Kody and crew visited on the sister wives show. I can't remember his name, he had two wives with straight dark hair and he always talked like he had tobacco in his lip. He was the one who make the statement that polygamy isn't just about sex because he thought he had TOO much sex. He also pissed off Janelle when he talked openly about his wives cycles aligning. She got up and left with that conversation. I thought he was basically an ass, but a different kind of ass. But when he said that if his wives were feeling jealous that meant he wasn't doing something right. I thought that made sense and yes...he needed to be the glue for it all, a leader. Then a TH with Kody about how he doesn't take responsibility for his wives emotional well being. It made me want to throw something at him.

Love comes from Loyalty to the Unit. The family. Love in itself doesn't matter. Not to that man anyway.

Oh goodness!! So glad that you are okay...and back as well :)

And that is why they won't have a "successful" and "fulfilling" polygamous family. At the heart is the man and how he juggles all the women and children. Kody has never been successful, and he doesn't care about their womanly emotions. The biggest and most glaring thing wrong with the family is Kody. He isn't a leader, he's as AssHat. I didn't care much for that other polygamous man either, but when he said that if his wives were jealous, then it was his issue and he is failing them somehow...I did agree with him. That statement shot holes through Kody and showed him for the selfish narcissist that he is. Even his show opening line "love should be multiplied, not divided" is a huge joke!! For him the love and adoration is multiplied. Wives, children. Everyone wants Daddy's attention when he arrives (until they are old enough to get what everything is about anyway), yet the love that the wives and children RECEIVE...that is divided and divided some more. I guess he should have paid more attention in that class...you know..the one with plusing and minusing.

It was King Kody who christened that room "The Library". They were doing a walk through of the houses when they were being built the contractor left a door opening where it didn't belong. When Christine was standing there it was Kody who jumped up to make the mistake (fixing it will slow down the construction timeline) into a "sell" for Christine and he stated that it was the Library!! She immediately went along with it.

12 years ago from 2016 would roughly be a year-ish before they moved into the Lehi house. The two kids from about that timeline would be Janelle's youngest Savanah and Christine's Ysabel (sp?). If I remember correctly Janelle was living on her own with her kids separate and inherited money that was used to buy the Lehi house. With the grand promise from King Kody that they would all be together BUT in separate living quarters for wifely autonomy. Meaning that Meri and Janelle could ignore each other for the good of the family.

I've read quite a few books about women's stories of their life in polygamy. I think it was in "Escape" by Carolyn Jessop where she described sexual contact with her husband very graphically. There was nothing past primal "meeting of needs" by the husband and they even kept their magic long underwear on during the encounter. I agree that most if not all women would dread physical contact with their husbands with that kind of intimacy.

Yes, but that doesn't get any attention or sympathy...