When that Mormon polygamist group’s insider drama hit the news circuits last year, the CEO of the sponsorship marketing firm I work for sent around a joking email reading, ‘This is marketing gone wrong.’ On the page of the NY Times, next to the article’s aerial photo of the group’s vast, cookie-cutter white temple in Utah was an ad for Disneyworld, with the Cinderella castle logo, reading, innocent in its creepy irony, ‘The happiest place on earth.’

The women of that Mormon group and the lavish, ostentatious fortress with its surrounding compound looks almost exactly like the Sisters, as the women in my childhood group, ‘The Church’ are called. The Church’s ‘conference centers’ spread around the world bear an eerie and disturbing resemblance to that temple as well. The similarity was not – is never, in any encounter with news flashes on cults – lost on me.

The Church was like a Buddhist temple surrounded by the barbed wire of a concentration camp.

That’s what it was like for me, growing up there. 

Outsiders couldn’t get in, and if you already were inside, you couldn’t get out.

But someone always tries to get past the guards.

When I finally did thrash my way out, dripping blood but glowing hope, I found it was as they said.

The World was a minefield. And the bombs would get you sooner or later.

Sooner or later most escapees drag themselves back to the jagged haven, preferring the torture room to an unknown lurking death.  

Sometimes, still, I think of going back, bowed for punishment, cowering for a bowl of warm gruel. But it’s too late. The swamp I’m wading through has swallowed the trail. 

And I have glimpsed a green, clean light, up and above the valley of the shadow of death, where bombs do not lie in wait, and entangling barbs are not the only alternative.

*** 

“I can’t believe Heidi is adopting a seventeen year old.” Twenty-eight year old Kristin’s incredulous remark interrupts my search for an affordable two-bedroom in Los Angeles. I look up from my online Craigslist page and stare at my friend as she shuffles in ostentatiously bright blue fuzzy slippers her mom gave her down her ironwork stairs. I’m lounging in her living room on a circular futon with my iBook.

Even though I’m in the process of something as concrete as looking for housing for the younger brother I’ll be the official legal guardian of less than a month from now, Kristin’s comment still catches me off-guard. It’s been under twenty-four hours since the official decision, and I feel utterly unprepared mentally and spiritually – never mind financially - for what is happening.  

“Look at her woeful expression,” Mischa, same age as Kristin and myself, teases from her seat on the hardwood floor where she’s cutting and measuring a pattern for her latest costume design. “Well Heidi,” she says, in a moment of seriousness, “This is crazy, but if anyone can handle it, you can.”   

In true form, my two best friends are being supportive while keeping a sense of humor about this latest unforeseen event. We like to joke that the Murphy’s Law of the universe sees fit to bestow only one or two of us at a time with depression, abject loss or confusion, allowing the other(s) to pull out of their own prior issue just in time to bolster the needs of the latest victim. Something’s always side-blinding one of us on this rollercoaster of a sweet, sweet joke called Life.

Adopting a brother who was born when I was only ten myself, however, hits a new mark on the meter.

“You can’t believe it’s happening, can you,” laughs Kristin. “Mama. That’s your new name. Mom.”

“Mama Mia, Mama Mia” trills Mischa. Her vibrato warbles in harmony with a Devendra Banhart song playing on the online radio station Pandora upstairs on her computer. I’ve driven across town from the Venice Beach bungalow I’ve called home for the last four years to spend a low-key Friday night at this home-away-from-home in east Los Angeles’ Echo Park.

But I’m not just here because I need to talk and sleepovers are fun. I’m here in case the nightmares return. I can’t spend another sweat-drenched night alone with the subconscious whose insistent clamorings were the catalyst to this whole unlikely decision. 

“Chocolate-chip cookies,” Kristin echoes Mischa’s vibrato with a high falsetto as she pulls a tray out of the oven. “They’re made with coconut oil,” she says. “I hope that’s okay.” Kristin is obsessed with health food, especially all things coconut. She’s a sales manager for VitaCoco coconut water. Her cellphone voicemail can get annoying: “HI! It’s Krissie with VitaCoco!” but the side benefit of perpetually available cases of the sweet, antioxidant-filled liquid is positively addictive.

Tonight though, Kristin is making homemade ginger tea, because she has a cold that keeps acting up, and ginger is ‘incredibly good for your digestive system, your immune system, and your blood pressure.’ She chops a finger of ginger into thin slices, puts it in an inch of water, boils it down to extract everything until its nice and yellow, adds a little more water, and boils it down again.

“I’m gonna have to get Ben on some government-issued drug test,” I say, unable to take my mind off my little brother, whose care my desperate, divorced parents of eight have begged me to attempt to undertake. “I can’t believe I’m already talking like one of my parents.”

“You better get all your pot-smoking out of your system now,” says Kristin.

“Or you can just be little pot-heads together,” says Mischa.

I stare them down, grimly teasing. “My son is not going to have bad influences around him.”

“Okay, okay,” says Mischa, scooping armfuls of material towards her sewing corner. “You don’t have to start referring to him as your son, here. He’s practically an adult, and besides, it’s only for a year, right?”

“I mean, I guess,” I say. “OK, you’re eighteen, you’re outta here! Just cause my parents did that doesn’t mean it’s how it’s supposed to work. Besides, I don’t know if he’s really a senior, considering he’s apparently dropped out of his high school in Vermont.”

Mischa stops the drum-drum of her sewing machine for a moment to glance at me sympathetically. Mischa’s family, a hop skip and jump across the Connecticut River in neighboring New Hampshire, is a little genius, a lot crazy, and more than eccentric, too. The fact that we can tell each other things we’d never want anyone else to know is as strong a bond as our mutual childhood loves of off-beat things like the adventures of Little House on the Prairie and Beatrix Potter’s quaint European illustrations of storybook Peter Rabbit fame.

“We used to call him Benjamin Bunny when he was a baby,” I say, thinking of our family’s dog-eared copy of the story of Peter Rabbit’s droopy-eared rabbit sibling. I can still picture Ben like it was yesterday, inching around the hardwood kitchen floor in his pajama gunny sack with a bib on because he drooled so much. “I was with my mom when Ben was born,” I recall.” I even cut his umbilical cord. His right arm came flopping out same time as his head. That’s why we named him ‘Benjamin.’ It means son of the right hand.”

“We?” points out Kristin.

“Yeah. Obviously not normal,” I say, thinking of the seven siblings I hold a mother’s love for. “The Church raised me to be the second mother. I always thought of all them as mine too.”

"The Church," says Kristin. "So lame that cult actually calls themselves 'The Church."

Mischa continues to feed gauzy white pleats into her sewing machine. “What are you sewing?” I ask, trying to change the subject.

“A robe with angel wings,” says Mischa, donning what is the robe so far and spinning in front of the mirror. The generous, floor-length pieces look fabulously like wings when she spreads her arms.

“For what?” I ask.

“That freaky millionaire, who dosed me with GHB and tried to get me to have sex with him and his girlfriend,” she says without batting an eyelash.

“Ew, why would you still be talking to him?” I ask.

“Because this pile of fabric is going to turn into money,” she says. “It’s clearly an act of desperation, since Mya Gyzander Costumes is low on work for the next month. Again. Anyway, I just don’t accept drinks from him anymore.” She giggles. “Last time, when I turned him down, he was like, do you want this dried pear? And I was like, that’s kinda weird, but I took it. And then I realized, of course. It’s shaped like a vagina.”

“It was probably laced with GHB too,” laughs Kristin.

For the first time I am seeing my friends from the perspective of a protective mother. Normally I would have laughed and said something about my own tragicomedic encounters with licentious Gatsby’s in LA, but now I’m thinking about this scene from the eyes of a boy that will soon be learning about women from me.

“So what’s Ben like?” asks Kristin, sensitive to my vibe. “I love all your other family members I’ve met so far.”

As my thoughts go to Ben’s traits, an iron-warm feeling, like honey swirling in strong, black tea, seizes my heart in a stronghold. Despite myself. For the duration of my twenties I’ve made a concerted effort to remove myself from that sense of paternal angst and feverish love towards all my siblings that pumps through my subconscious as consistent as a heartbeat. Professors, boyfriend’s mothers, therapists, friends, anyone I could get to listen to me have advised it again and again. You’re a young woman, I heard over and over. You didn’t ask for your parents to have eight children. It wasn’t fair to be told you had to be a mother, too. We know you really want to adopt Ben, Sam and Tom and join a communal farm in South America, northern California, Oregon, you-name-it with them but that’s not a good idea to do to yourself at this point in your life as a twenty-one, twenty-four, twenty-seven year old.

Their reasoning always sounded right to me, and since I’ve never had a lot to go on in the way of real-world rules or guidance, I stifled and suppressed the internal longing to save my youngest brothers, the ones who’d been most impressionable at the worst of it. I blocked out the sorrow I felt for the violent, confused world perception that had been their fate since the moment of birth, a fate I’d at least been old enough to run away from.

And now, after all that resistance, I’ve stumbled into what appears to be my unavoidable calling despite it all. I’m taking one of my younger brothers, and I’m going to give his future my best last-ditch shot at healthy.

As if I’m one to define it, but right now I’m the best he’s got.

“He’s taller than me,” I say of Ben, who’s bean-poled into a few inches over my five feet seven. “As of the last year or so. He’s sweet and artistic. He always has been. I used to save his drawings and poems when he was little, because they were different than anything I’d seen. He has such a unique view on the world.”

I warm to my topic, as I always do when offered an audience on the virtues of my siblings. 

“He’s so cute. He’s got these little cupid lips and this curly mop of hair, and once I saw him walking down the halls of his high-school and he was just the most sassy little guy. He was wearing a fur hat with ear-flaps and one of my dad’s blazers, and he was pointing at random guys he knew as he walked along. ‘Nelson.’ ‘Smith,’ or whatever, he was saying, with this tongue-in-cheek pursed-lip attitude.”

I stop myself from further gushing and let my thoughts wander.

When he talked sometimes I’d copy his sentences down because they sounded like impromptu haikus.

“If we fell right now our little bodies would be helpless. Tumbling down the hill,” he said once, out of a blue silence, while we were on a ski-lift in Vermont, swinging above fresh powder.

Then he turned to me and said, “Heidi, why aren’t you married by now?” I was twenty-six at the time, and defensive and snapped at him about the twenty-first century and ‘how they do it in Los Angeles.’ His face reflected regret for any insensitivity, and his actions showed casual solidarity when he changed the subject.

He was saying, ‘Oh, who cares, I love you and think you’re cool either way. Whatever.”

That was the last real time I spent any real time with him. Two years ago, already.

I wonder who he is now.

“Have you guys ever heard of Billy Childish?” Kristin asks from the couch where she’s strumming her guitar. "He's this musician who started a manifesto group thing to reinvent art. You should hear some of his quotes." She flips open her own laptop. "Listen to this one." She reads aloud: People have allowed themselves to be robbed of their child's right to create by giving up their power to communicate to the pathetic professionals. We at Group Hangman denounce the violence of the so-called 'professionals' and stand firm by the rights and laudability of the intrepid explorer. In short the critic without and within must be smashed and trampled underfoot."

“Ooh, I want to make a business card with 'intrepid explorer' as my occupation,” I laugh, more than half serious.

"I knew you'd love that line," says Kristin.

***

Intrepid explorer. 

My imagination thrills to the two words that veritably sum up my choices since the first time I questioned unquestionable authority and vowed to strike out on my own against all odds. I was seven, and a leading Brother, as the men were known among the Christian fundamentalists I was born into, had just warned my father I was a flirt, and should be reigned in. I felt a primal disgust and wanton rebellion, vowing internally to be just what they wanted to control. To the abject pleasure of a committed dissident, I went on to become known as a Jezebel in The Church before running away at the age of sixteen. 

Now, years later, I find myself back at the crossroads: take the sensible, prescribed route or strike out on the path less traveled? And the answer is, do what I do best, go against the odds and follow my intuition.

Ben told me when we talked on the phone that he wants to get weekly therapy together. I’ll find something we can afford. I’m going to have to revisit some unpleasant memories and some of the horror of it all I’ve blocked out, but I think it’s what we have to do, for the sake of his future and for our family’s healing. And in seeing it and sharing it through someone else’s eyes who was there too, I will finally get some clarity and move forward with my own life; which is crucial because I do have a life to live and a family of my own to begin someday. But it starts at home, and I am finally facing that, rather than running away.

Where will we be in a year? I don’t know. Quite possibly worse off in some ways, and maybe we won’t even make it. Maybe I can’t handle Ben. How I can assume to offer anything to my wounded, defiant little brother? He is, after all, a juvenile delinquent who needs a firm hand, and I’m a low-income softie, terrified of revisiting the violence and control of my past. But I was a juvenile delinquent too, in many ways worse off than anything Ben has done, and I am determined to apply the fundamentals I’ve learned since then: deign to control things, stay open-minded and in the moment, and most importantly, keep a positive attitude. It’s all a matter of perspective, and so I know, no matter what, regardless of circumstance, the true answer to where will we be in a year.

A place of learning and growth and continued healing, because that’s life, when lived right.  

I can’t help smirking at my own idealism. But at the same time, I’m happy I still have it deep down in there, despite it all, glimmering brightly as ever within the gale.

This is my family. This is my crazy saga. This is a story that maybe shouldn’t ever be told, and yet begs to be heard. This is the story of a sprawling, viciously loving, irrevocably old-soul’d collection of tenacious misfits. The eight Hough children were raised by Children of God hippie-cult members turned fundamentalist Christians turned despairing divorcees. We were trundled through the ever-changing landscapes of Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the East Coast, Canada and Europe, home-schooled according to our mother’s version of Montessori, indoctrinated in an absurdly wise ‘The Way, the Truth and the Life,’ and cast out without house or home or preparation, into a harsh, and junk-filled World that is all there is and yet that we’d rather not know. We find ourselves without the church that once insisted on possessing us, on a new and strange planet that recognizes not us nor we them, estranged from relatives with no home to return to. All we have is each other, and we know this, even as we habitually scrap and scratch and clutch for the little morsels we’ve had to fight for for survival, like baby eagles overfilling a nest. We know we will always have each other, and we know no one else can really laugh at jokes that draw from our uniquely peculiar sense of pop culture, release angst in battles of wit like boxing meets yoga, sprint faster and further like a herd of cheetahs amidst gazelles to catch the perfect spiral, and finally, settle like lumped puppies before a fire, giggling and gurgling our own unspoken language in an identical cluster of infinite variety, complete onto ourselves. We have been infinitely scarred and stricken, embattled and beleagured, but we are rising, like phoenixes from an ash which shall be borne away and into the wind, and we are Becoming. Together Again.

Our togetherness is our home, and step by step we are learning, with renewed joy, that no one and nothing can take that away from us.