Woman who grew up in polygamist cult reveals what her family said when she left religion

A woman who grew up in a house with four mums and 44 siblings has revealed how her family reacted when she said she was going to leave.

Utah woman Janet is child number 25 of 45 in her family, and the 32-year-old has siblings as old as 48 and as young as 15 which makes for a family situation that takes some explaining.

Her family was part of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a group of Mormon fundamentalists that practice polygamy, so her father was married to four women.

She does a lot of her explaining through TikTok videos where she answers people's questions about her family and what her life was like, and Janet recently spoke to LADbible to talk further about her family life.

Janet said that sometimes when she doesn't have much time to explain things she'll tell people she has 11 siblings because her biological mum had 12 children, but she sees all of her dad's wives as her mothers.

"He thought I was making a mistake"

Janet's biological mum was her dad's first wife and she had 12 children, 13 of her siblings were born from her father's second wife, and his third and fourth wives both had 10 children.

Among this group there are no twins, but there are three pairs of siblings out of the 45 in total who share a birthday with someone else in the family.

Aged 20 when she moved out, Janet had decided she was going to leave her family's religion and move out of the house.

She explained that she'd been 'talking about it with some of my sisters', but a month before she moved out she told her mother 'just to give her time to process it'.

"It was more about her being sad of me moving out of the house than leaving the religion, because I think my mom was questioning it at that time too," Janet explained.

"With my dad though, he was the most passionate about his religion. So I told him two or three days before I moved out. And it was just like a conversation where I said, 'hey, I need to talk to you when you have a moment'. And we did.

"He honestly handled it very well in the moment. But as days went on, he was starting to express more and more how he thought I was making a mistake, how he thought I was throwing my life away or that I'm going to lose myself and everything like that."

"When I left they didn't cut me off"

Janet says that she 'just knew within myself that I was making the right choice', explaining that she started questioning the religion she'd been raised in when she was 17.

While she left home she didn't move far away, though it was a 'big adjustment' for her and her family as she went from living in a house with her parents and siblings to living alone.

Leaving the house and the religion didn't mean leaving her family, however.

She said: "When I left, they didn't cut me off. I could still go over there, could still see my family. It was still a really big adjustment for them, though, because I was one of the first siblings to leave. So it was a big adjustment.

"Now half of my family is out of the religion. And half of them are still in it, so it's more normalized now. But 13 years ago when I left, it wasn't."

"I only lived 10 minutes down the road"

As you may be able to imagine, Janet found living alone 'very peaceful' after spending most of her life sharing her room with several siblings.

The home she'd grown up in had been large, with 13 bedrooms and 15 bathrooms, but even in a house that size she 'couldn't always have my personal space'.

She described living with her family as a 'constant flow' where they all 'had to work like a community' with Janet and her siblings doing various chores including looking after children, cooking meals and cleaning.

She also remembers her older sisters playing a big part in raising her, with one sibling who was eight years older and '17 or 18 kids between' them in the sibling order having Janet 'with her all the time'

Janet said: "Moving out of my parents' house to my own place and me having my nine to five job, a lot of it felt kind of easier in a way because I wasn't constantly doing all the work that I was doing at my family's house."

After leaving the religion Janet spent a couple of years living in Hawaii with her husband, but has moved back to Utah to be closer to her family.

"We didn't really celebrate birthdays growing up"

Janet prides herself on remembering all of the birthdays for her 44 siblings, which is no small feat, but she said that when she was growing up her family didn't celebrate birthdays in the same way as others.

Instead, a typical birthday gift would be getting to 'choose what the family got to have for dinner that day', and she remembered that her older sisters would make cakes or cookies for them.

When she was a teenager one of her mums 'buying us some birthday gifts because she was one of the working moms', but it wasn't something that happened every year.

She said: "When growing up, my dad said it was because it was worldly and we didn't celebrate it. We didn't celebrate Christmas either.

But I think it's really because they just couldn't really afford it. So many kids, they could not afford birthdays. They couldn't afford all these Christmas gifts. So that was a lot."

Nowadays she says her family are 'really big on celebrating Christmas' and the whole family comes together, like they do on 'big milestone birthdays'.

Janet has a goal one day that she'll buy Christmas gifts for all of her siblings and their children, and says that the family has 'done a lot of joint gifts'.

"I thought everyone lived this way"

Growing up, Janet thought her family situation was 'completely normal' and that 'everyone lived this way', explaining that they 'couldn't go on vacation' because a family of five parents and 45 children was 'too much to manage'.

She remembered learning many families weren't quite like hers when she was 'eight or 10 years old' and asked a neighbour's child 'how many moms do you have'.

"I thought it was completely normal, I thought everyone lived this way," Janet said.

"And she's like ‘what do you mean, I only have one mom’, and I was like ‘what you only have one mom’ and in my head I'm thinking that is so sad.

"Then I'm skipping away like 'huh, what a a weirdo, she only has one mom'. Then I learned I'm the weirdo in that situation, I've got four.

"I don't even know if I told her that I had four because I was told to never tell a stranger how many siblings I have and how many moms I have because it was an actual danger growing up where my parents could have gone to prison."

The woman said she used to live 'in a lot of stress' whenever she heard a police siren because she was scared they were coming to take her family away.