I Could Hear the Hearts Breaking on Every Page

I returned from Dream St today, but am not going to blog about it just yet because all of the photos aren't online yet, and I wanted to put some of them in so that you can really see how wonderful Dream St is. Until then back to your regularly scheduled programing!

Polygamy has always interested me. I think I might have blogged about it before, I really can't recall. I love to show Sister Wives, it is interesting to learn about how different people live, especially in pleural  marriage. Sister Wives shows an honest view of polygamy, as far as I can tell, and even though it is hard they seem to all like the family at the end of the day. Shattered Dreams by Irene Spencer paints a very different picture of the polygamous life style. Irene was raised in a family with sister wives, and although she saw how miserable it made her mother she still decided to become a second wife. Eventually her husband moved the family to Mexico, where they lived in poverty, and always just barely made ends meet. Eventually the family had 9 wives and some 58 children, 13 of which Spencer gave birth to. The majority of the kids were born in adobe houses with little to no attention from any sort of trained medical officials. Shattered Dreams gives a gut wrenching portrayal of something that is normally swept under the rug. Spencer tells the reader every detail of her life as one of multiple wives, and is so brutally honest that it is almost impossible to put down, even though sometimes you want to cry after reading how hard it was on Spencer, the other wives, and the kids. Overall it was an amazing book that lays it all on the line, the good the bad and the downright ugly.