Robyn Brown is not holding back about how her new family dynamic is impacting her life.
During the season 18 premiere of Sister Wives on Sunday, Robyn, 44, recalled how things have shifted in her marriage to Kody Brown now that his other wives, Meri Brown, Janelle Brown and Christine Brown, have separated from the polygamist setup.
“It’s tense in the family across the board. It’s tense for a couple different reasons,” said Robyn, who has been in the plural marriage for almost a decade.
“There’s Christine leaving and her divorcing Kody is — there’s a lot of tension going on. Now they’re talking about doing Christmas separate,” she continued. “It’s just like this whole new worry and heartbreak and stress about whether or not we’ll not be together for Christmas, but it’s still horrible to sit and think about.”
“It’s scaring me, it’s stressing me out a lot,” she added of the family’s 2022 holiday plans, which were put on display during Sunday’s episode.
Robyn went on to recall how she and the Browns have always celebrated holidays together ever since she became legally married to Kody, 54, in 2014.
However, things took a turn during the COVID-19 outbreak when Kody — who is father to 18 children from his four marriages — implemented strict rules on his family, prompting some of their issues to get “amplified.”
“From the minute I met the family, we’ve been doing holidays together. Every single holiday together and this is just such a weird experience to go, ‘Who’s going to be together for the holidays?’ It just seems so screwed up, and I hate it,” Robyn admitted.
When Robyn entered the polyamorous bunch almost 10 years ago, she was met with skepticism by Meri, Janelle and Christine, who had already spent time building a family with Kody.
After expected ups and downs from a family as large as theirs, some challenges proved to be too much for some of the parties involved.
Within a span of 14 months, three of the Sister Wives patriarch’s marriages imploded. Kody’s third wife, Christine, was the first to leave in November 2021. A year later in December 2022, it was revealed that he had separated from his second wife Janelle. A month after that, his union with first wife Meri was over by January 2023 after the pair’s relationship had been platonic and distant for years.
The strain carried over into season 18 as the split weighed heavy on the once-happy family.
“You know, everybody made choices. Christine chose to leave,” Kody claimed during the season premiere. “Janelle’s choosing Christine as somebody she wants to be close to rather than Meri or Robyn — or even me.”
The head of the household added that because everyone made their own decisions, it “frustrates” him when certain people then act like “victims.
During the show, Janelle also noted that she never foresaw her getting a new RV home as something that would put “ even more strain” on their family.
“I thought we’d have this grand adventure. I didn’t anticipate it would be so hard,” she shared in a confessional. “When it wasn’t all easy and it wasn’t comfortable and it was hard, I think Kody really got disillusioned very fast. And it was really easy to blame me for this.”
Meanwhile, Meri suggested there have always been underlying issues that eventually caused the situation to become even more unbearable. “When Robyn came into the family, we were not a perfect family, but we were a really good family,” she confessed.
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
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