EP12: Surviving a Polygamous Cult, Family Abuse, and Finding Purpose Through Kindness in Motion

This Is Tineise’s Story

In this episode of the Irene Podcast, host Hope interviews Tineise Davenport, with the nonprofit Kindness in Motion. Tineise explains she grew up in a polygamous cult environment connected to multiple fundamentalist groups (including Centennial Park, FLDS/Colorado City, and the AUB), describing secrecy, fear of government, and strict gender expectations that discouraged girls from asking questions. She recounts that in July 1993, when she was five, her mother was life-flighted to a Salt Lake City hospital after an incident Tineise was later told involved falling from a truck, a story she came to believe did not make sense. Tineise describes how her father remarried in September 1993 to Lenora (his secretary), who moved in with five children while still married to someone else, and how Tineise’s mother later returned home awake but paralyzed and unable to speak. Tineise details severe abuse in the household, including witnessing her brother being beaten unconscious, and her mother had to watch the abuse while immobilized; her mother died when Tineise was seven. As a neglected and angry child, Tineise began sneaking out and spending time with boys from Colorado City who later became known as the “Lost Boys,” running away multiple times; at 13 she reached Hurricane, was arrested for breaking into a friend’s family’s house, and was sentenced to two weeks in juvenile detention. A guardian ad litem, Angela Adams, investigated abuse concerns and helped place Tineise in her maternal grandmother’s custody at a remote polygamist-affiliated ranch in the Utah desert, where Tineise learned independence skills but later returned to her father and ran away again. Between roughly 15–18, she describes heavy drinking, smoking, living with or around Lost Boys in St. George, and feeling abandoned, while noting an uncle helped her by providing a car even though she was unlicensed. Then Tineise became pregnant and says her daughter “saved” her by prompting her to stop drinking and smoking and focus on being a mother; she later left the child’s father around the time her daughter was one due to an unhealthy relationship. Tineise also shares she learned years later that her mother had planned to tell Tineise’s father she wanted a divorce shortly before the trip in 1993. Tineise will be back to continue her story and connect it to her nonprofit. Tineise briefly describes Kindness in Motion as focused on community connection linking people in need with those who can help and “bringing back the village” motivated by her belief that spreading love and kindness helps people heal.

00:47 Growing Up in a Polygamous Cult: The Groups, Secrecy, and Control
04:13 1993: Mom’s “Accident,” Hospital Visit, and a Sudden New Wife
07:43 Mom Returns Home Paralyzed: Living Through Abuse and Silence
14:19 Angry Childhood & Neglect: Sneaking Out, Being Raised by Siblings
20:03 Lost Boys & Desert Nights: Disappearing to Survive
25:50 Arrested at 13: Breaking & Entering, Court, and Juvenile Detention
28:21 New Custody, New Isolation: Life at Sanctuary Ranch
32:43 Found Family: Living with the Lost Boys (and an Uncle Who Helped)
38:01 Two Weeks Before 18: Pregnancy That Turned Her Life Around
40:07 Motherhood, Leaving a Bad Relationship, and Becoming Like Her Mom
43:19 Wrap-Up: Kindness in Motion + Next Episode part 2

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Transcript

 Welcome back to the Irene Podcast. Today we have with us Tineise Davenport with kindness in motion. It's a beautiful new nonprofit that we've just discovered, and we're so excited to have her on our podcast and to tell us a little bit of her story, and then we'll talk a little bit about what she does with kindness in motion.

Hi, welcome. Thank you. I I know we, we met at a, an event that we went. Too and got to know a little bit about what you do, and I know that a mutual friend of ours kind of told you that I had a, a story that you might wanna hear. So I know you don't know a whole lot, but we'll figure it out. We're about to, yeah.

So, so go ahead, start wherever you feel comfortable starting. Well, I know that the, the message here is you can grow up with a history of a traumatic background or hard things can happen to you and you can stand up, dust off, move on, and move forward in life and get somewhere. Great. So my, we can start with the background.

Where I came from. I did grow up in a polygamous cult. I know that's a harsh word, but I believe it, it's a cult. And at the intersection of several of them. So my dad is from a group called Centennial Park. It's just a break off of Colorado City, the FLDS group, they broke off in 1986. My mother is from the a UB.

Which is the one that's based out of northern Utah, Riverton Bluff area. My dad's second wife is from the Le Baron Colony out of Mexico, and I've, I've got entered. C family connections with polygamy all over the place. And I, I've spent a lot of time researching the connections between them. It's a lot of fun.

There's a lot of, a lot of history there. But it's, it was interesting to be part of all of that because my personal upbringing was Marion Hammond meets Owen all red meets Irwin LeBaron meets Warren, Jeffs, it was all in one household. My dad's third wife is from Colorado City, so it was. There are a lot of, all of the things you hear about growing up in a polygamous type cult, the secrecy, the, we don't talk, we don't tell the governments out to get us.

There's so much stuff that gets swept under the rug because it's in an environment that allows that to happen. Mm-hmm. It cultivates an environment for it. There was a lot of, personal issues that I had with being a female in those communities because it's even worse. 'cause the girls aren't really supposed to ask questions.

You start asking questions and it's like, what are you doing? Go back to home. Go back to your kitchen. Wear your apron strings. Like why? Why are you barking up the wrong tree? Don't, you don't need to be asking questions. We just do kind of like know your place and get back into it. Stay in your lane. Whereas I could watch even my brothers ask some of the same questions and be told, not the answers. 'cause you don't get the answers publicly, but be told you're gonna go to priesthood meetings someday. We'll explain. Well like, you know, someday you can be part of this, it'll make sense. A secret society.

You know? So there was a lot of those feelings of what is all of this? And, a lot of that took me years to transmute through, but my real story could have happened anywhere. So while I did have three moms, it was not all at one time. My mom, then she died second mom, then she left third mom, then she left it.

There was ever three in one household. So I didn't get that experience. That would've been fun, but I missed out on that component of it. First my dad married my mom. And she and my dad had five kids, two girls, then a boy, then two girls before she, I'm gonna say, almost died. I, I don't, I still am not sure how to put the words around that.

I, for most of my life, I just said her accident. I don't know if hoodie was even that. And I, well, I did end up finding out the accident I was told happened, definitely didn't. But then it was. Okay. Complicated, or we're gonna start at the beginning. My, my mom wa it was in 1993, July of 1993, my dad and my mom went on this camping trip and my mother did not come back from it.

We went to go see her, the hospital in Salt Lake City. She had been life flighted up there. I don't. I have any memory of my mother before this. This is my entire memory of my mom. The earliest memory I have of the day, I saw her in the hospital bed. So, and you were five at that time? I was five, yeah.

Okay. So my mom was in the hospital. I was, I don't know how we got there. Nobody was talking. It was like nobody would say anything. It was weird to me that it seemed like nobody knew and they were still trying to figure it out. You kind of accept really early on though, the whole, everything seems to be a mystery and nobody likes to tell you things, so I think I kind of stomached it for a while at first, but for a long time I, but I don't know.

I, I didn't even know, I didn't know why she was there. I didn't know why she wasn't coming home. And, and then a, a large component of it was just feeling confused, like. There, 'cause there were so many different things going on and we were staying with my grandmother and I don't, I don't remember. I and I haven't been able to piece together why us kids were split up.

The two youngest was with one grandma, the three oldest we were with another, but I was with one of my grandmothers who took me to the hospital to go see my mom and. You know how young children's memory is. It didn't, turns out it wasn't quite as fast as I think it was, but in my memory, I saw my mom in the hospital and the next day I went to my dad, back to my dad's house, and there was a new woman living there with her five kids.

My dad was getting married again and had to some woman that already had five kids and she had already moved in and we were moving on with life. And there was no grieving, there was no talking about it. We just, we just moved on and we acted like she was not sitting in a hospital bed in, in Salt Lake.

Like she just wasn't there. Why know what, when are we gonna go get her? We're not. When is she coming home? We don't know. But the more you ask questions, the more you were just told to shut down. Just let it go. Stop talking about it. Shut it down. Do what you're told. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it was just weird.

Yeah. And anyway, it's interesting 'cause at five years old you knew it was weird, right? Yeah. Like you're five. Yeah. And you're trying to process and you know, it's not right for me to not know. What happened to my mom and when she's coming home, well, or if she's going to ever come home. My dad and, and this new woman very did, they did a really good job of managing that.

We were very quickly introduced to the kids first, and I think that that is why I was able to kind of be okay with it. I loved the kids. It was so cool having big sisters. Some half of them, most of them were older than me. I had big sisters now. I had a big brother that I'd never had before and. I just kind of got excited about the kids.

They did a really good job of really trying to cater to that, just bringing the kids together and creating that relationship. And that's really kind of what made it Okay. The, the new five siblings that I had were great. I, I have all the respect in the world for them. They're cool. Wasn't their fault either.

Yeah, none of it was so. I ended up finding out that it was actually at first, back to my grandma's house for a little while and then came to my dad's. But still, very quickly, my, the accident was July, 1993. My dad was married again. Got married in September of 1993 and was on his honeymoon when he got the call saying that my mom had woken up from like a comatose state and.

And was still in a vegetative state. So she was awake, wide awake, knew everything going on around her, but was unable to move. So it was, it's like being paralyzed from head to toe. And so she couldn't even speak. She was awake, but she couldn't even speak. She couldn't, she couldn't talk, she couldn't do anything.

She couldn't hands tied. And it already felt weird that, you know, we went from mom. It's gone. W why new woman in the house? Why we just move on and act like it didn't happen? Why? But one of the hardest whys was why they chose to move my mom back into the house too. And you want to paint to definition of hell that was.

That was fun. I, it was one of the things that the religion lost grip on me pretty quickly is because they use the, you're gonna burn in hell for all of eternity. Or if you don't do good things, you know God's gonna condemn you to hell after you see what hell looks like the. You can throw me with hell you want.

Pretty sure there's nothing worse, but I want, if I wanted to paint a definition of hell, I would say my mother went through that. To be trapped in a body where you have to watch your children being abused in every way, shape and form from your husband and the new woman that he's with, and you have to just sit there and watch it and you can't do anything about it.

Your hands are literally tied. That would be hell. I cannot imagine as a mother, and I was seven when she died and I was, I felt guilty about it forever, but I was happy. Thank goodness she does not have to go through that anymore. I knew that at seven that like it was wrong for them to put her in the middle of that.

That was. Why would you make her sit there and watch that? Yeah. It was bad enough that the kids were experiencing the abuse and being told that the abuse was their fault, and in some way, shape, and form, it always came back on. Well, that's what you get for dressing like that, or that's what you get for being there.

Or, well, it's your fault. You made me mad. Mm-hmm. Some of it that like couldn't, shouldn't have even be rationalized watching my brother get beat to the point that he was unconscious because he touched something he shouldn't. It's a little ex extreme, you know? Yeah. But to make her watch that I feel like is the, the, the biggest sin of them all.

That's the one that hurts me the most. Yeah. Like, I can't believe they put her through that. And then the, the fact that throughout all of this there's so much of it that didn't make sense. Mm-hmm. A lot of it, the, the details just didn't fall together. I, I, it took me about two years, a year or two before somebody started telling me the story of what happened to my mom, how, how this happened, how did she get in this condition in the first place, and I was told that they were coming back from a camping trip.

And that my mother driving down the highway at 65 miles an hour had had this idea that she needed to fix the fishing poles in the back of the truck that were falling. So she climbed into the back of the truck to fix them, and she fell out and hit the road. And that is how she was. Her body was damaged in the way that it was.

Okay. Five. You are still in this age. Well, okay, now, at this point I was like six. It was about a year or so after that. I remember being told the story for the first time and I bought it. Okay. Like your parents tell you something, you think it's true. It wasn't until I was seven. I went, I remember the day I got on the bus.

And I was talking to this kid that lived across the street from me, Zachary Horsley, who's my, my best friend at that time. And I don't recall how the conversation came up. I think I said something about my mom and he said, I don't, how did, how did your mom, how did this happen anyway? And I was like, oh, I was told that, you know, she climbed in the back of the truck to fix these fishing poles and she fell.

And this 7-year-old goes, that doesn't make sense. And I realized that if a 7-year-old is gonna say something doesn't make sense, it's gotta be confusing. Right. So, but the funny thing is, is again, we instinctually want to defend our parents as children. We instinctually are like, no, I, my parents love me.

They, they wouldn't. Lie to me, like my dad says, it's true, it's true. But I went to go argue with him and I couldn't. I just sat there and I remember like throughout that day, just it was like I was trying to formulate this argument to just be like, no, it does make sense 'cause. Well wait, no, hold on. And by the end of that day, I was completely convinced.

There's no way that, that makes sense. Love my mother to death. With all due respect, she was 250 pounds and it wasn't muscle. She did not scale the side of an F three 50 or fit through the little tiny window if there was one at the, yeah, there was a, there was the little trip, half shade window thing that didn't happen, right?

So at seven I figured that out, like, well, that did not happen. That. Does not math in any way. I don't know a stunt man that would do that, so I, I didn't ask again for a couple of years though. It the. Environment that we were living in made me feel afraid to step on toes. You know what it's like to, to question wa live in a world where you feel like you walk on eggshells.

I, I, I tipped around around eggshells for a while. I, I didn't become the, the squeaky, obnoxious wheel that I eventually became until a couple more years. I was, I think I was probably about nine the first time I remember saying like, what really happened? And I very clearly and adamantly was told the exact same story again.

Like, and the message was pretty clear. Like, asking questions is pointless, it's not gonna change anything. So I, I. While I still didn't believe it, I was kind of just forced to sit with that for a while. And I think it created an angry child. It was a little I want to apologize to everyone that knew me during, from 10 to 18.

Okay. But I, I became. I didn't really care. I just run where I want, go do what I want. By the time I was 10, I was 10 years old. I look at, I have an 11-year-old now. I can't imagine him doing these things. I cannot. I can't imagine it. Yeah. 10 years old. I was sneaking out in the middle of the night at two o'clock in the morning and just going wherever I wanted.

I would, after school go do whatever I wanted because. Nobody cared. And the only person that did care was my sister, just older than me, but she was overwhelmed. She was left to raise us starting at age eight. While yes, my dad was providing for the bills for the household. But when you're providing for 10, which actually became 12 children, you have to go to work a lot.

And he was just, he was just kind of mostly gone. And when he wasn't gone, you wish he was. And then when she was there, we always wish she wasn't like it was better when they were gone. And I think that that's why you, you're talking about your second My, the the step wife? Yes. Okay. So the new mom that stepped in when your mom was Yeah.

Still in the hospital. Yeah. Okay. I guess let's just do names 'cause I don't care if my story's gonna get out anyway and it makes it easier. So my dad is Daniel, second wife, Lenora. Lenora was.

I don't, there was so much that just became weirder and weirder. Mm-hmm. Like the, my mom being gone, how she died didn't make any sense at all. And. Didn't still today does not make sense. I literally got off the phone with Utah Highway Patrol on my way over here. I'm still looking for answers, documents, something.

Mm-hmm. There's so much that just doesn't make sense. But then looking at Lenora's story there, it got even weirder. She, when the day that she moved in with my dad and brought her five kids with her, she was married to somebody else, she had picked up in the middle of the night and picked up her five kids and moved into my dad's house and left her husband at home.

I don't, I don't know. Interesting. I dunno why. And were, were they in the same. No group. I, I don't, I don't quite understand all of it, but I know that there's out in Colorado City not far is another group. Right. And that's the group that you were in? Yes. So was she from the Colorado City group or No, she originally came the Irwin Le Baron Colony out of Mexico.

Okay. So her family's Le Baron. But the reason she was connected to, or knew my dad, I guess my dad owned a construction company in St. George. Mm-hmm. She was his secretary. So that's, I believe, how they met and knew each other. She was my dad's secretary. So my dad moves his secretary and while my mom's in the hospital basically.

Okay. And she was, she was married. Not to him. I, I found that out a long, a while later. I, there's so many things that as I've learned. Yeah. 'cause I really started kind of having to research what actually happened throughout my whole life. 'cause it was all a lie. Turns out. Most of my childhood was told to me incorrectly.

And I've learned really the story of my childhood only in the last 10 years because what I thought happened didn't, in most everything anyway, I didn't know until years later she was married. I still am working on trying to figure out how, how that happened. I, I don't fully know. Anyway, so. Yeah, she, she moves in, she's married.

All of this stuff's happening. I lost my train of thought. Pull me back. Where am I? So you, you were 10 sneaking out Oh, okay. Of the house. Yeah. My, my sister, my oldest sister was, well, Lenora was gone a lot. My dad was gone a lot. My oldest sister was. Seven at the time, six, seven years old at the time that my mom left the first time and she stepped up and she became mom.

Like she, when Lenora left? No. So Lenora ended up leaving left? No, even when Lenora was there. Oh, okay. Lenora was either there and just kind of there with her kids, or we were trying to avoid her or she was gone. She was gone a lot too. There was frequently all 10 of us just kind of in the house together, but the oldest of her five kids.

Kind of became mom. Okay. And the oldest of my mom's five kids kind of became mom like, you're responsible for these kids. You're responsible for these kids. At seven, eight years old, I remember my sister Danielle, she was making all the meals. She did all the cooking. She combed the toddler's hair, and she got me off to school every morning.

She was responsible for ensuring everything happened when she was like seven, eight. So by the time I started sneaking out at like 10 Danielle's, 12, she's so overwhelmed with the. Eight, 10 and 6-year-old at this point. She didn't know where I was. She didn't care. I'm not there. I'm just not having to worry about me.

My brother just below me. Caught on pretty quickly too, and I feel bad about this. My, my sister, Danielle and I talked about it a lot now, but she really eventually kind of just became responsible for the youngest two and my brother Russell and I just kind of learned to fend for ourselves. We just figured it was easier if we just.

Stay outta the way. We'll go over here and we left Danielle to just raise the babies. You do that and we'll just stay outta your way. And Russell and I just dipped and disappeared all the time. We just. Goodbye. Where would you go? By the time I was 11, I had found this little niche group of boys that were out of Colorado City.

They were the, the problem boys at first, before they became the lost boys. Okay. So I was friends with a lot of these boys before, before they actually got kicked out and became lost boys. They. They were kicked out because some of them, yes, some no, but a lot of 'em, because they were the problem ones, they were the ones that were doing this, run out into the desert in the middle of the night, 11 years old.

I was sneaking out in the middle of the night into the middle of the desert at one o'clock in the morning with a whole bunch of boys lighting bon fires in the middle of the desert, out on the White Rock in the Arizona Strip 'cause. Why not? And when I'd get outta school, I would walk home frequently from Colorado City to Centennial Park, mile and a half or so, across a busy highway and very busy highway.

It is quite, well, it didn't used to be as busy, but the cars are going fast. Yeah. It was 50 mile an hour zone. Yeah. And you have to run across highway real fast. Yeah, I was, I was doing that at 11. Like I said, I look at my 11-year-old now and I was like, no way. You are not doing that. I don't care that I did it.

You're not, so, yeah, I just tried to just kind of vanish. And then my dad started coming home more. Because there was a lot of tension between him and Lenora. She ended up leaving right around the time I was 13, this little two year window. Before that, he started coming home more, being around more, trying to work things out more.

She started being gone more. She, she. Ran away a few times. One time she took off to Mexico, my dad went chasing her. Another time she moved to like a trailer park, literally a couple blocks away. And then she ended up moving to Apple Valley like 10 minutes away and she just kept leaving and coming back doing this common yo-yo thing and abusive relationships.

Leave, come back, leave, come back. Mm-hmm. So there was this weird window where she was here, gone here, gone here, gone quite a bit. So during that phase, my dad was around a lot more. He started coming back more, he started being a little more responsible. He was there more. And that was not a good thing.

That was, I, I know. I ran away at 11, I ran away again at 12. Both of those times were not super successful, but the day I ran away when I was 13 was the day I watched my dad beat my brother unconscious. It was like the anger level was just getting worse, and the more he was home, the worse it was. You just wished he wasn't home.

So we,

yeah, him. Him. So you're 13 and you get out because you watched your brother beat so badly. Like that's just. That's heavy at 13 years old, still like, I don't know, I, it's so crazy to me what we can experience at such a young age and the resilience that we do have or we can have. So start at 13, like so now you run away successfully.

How did that look for you? It, it was successfully due to the help of other people. And the reason it was successful is because this time I had made it as far as hurricane. The first two times I was found by the cops in Colorado City. And anybody that knows what the cops at that time were like, they, they were not gonna be on my side.

They were not gonna be helpful in any way, shape, or form. They will just make you go home. So, because they were members of the same faith, so they, they were, were all members of the, the FLDS, just across the, so they kind of had this like, no, we keep our own within our community. We don't let 'em out kind thing.

Yeah. Especially the girls. So that's definitely no, that, that, that was kind of how it was in Card City. The cops were very kind of, kind of control and help keep the secrets secret, keep the girls home, enforce the. The other government, the the ones that are really in charge. Yeah. And enforce their law.

And but for us, I said wrong side of the tracks and we were on the other side of the road. It was a little different. It was, it was almost like the cops kind of treated us like they. Here, you go back over there and they, he, they, no, they just wanted me home, drop me off in the drive away. It wasn't about enforcing, it was just, they didn't wanna deal with me.

So they quickly would just take me back where I belonged and, and just dropped me off. And again, 11, 12, I think I pretty quickly was like, well, all right, well, I'm home. And I obviously wasn't getting very far out there either. And I hadn't gone, been gone for very long and I just ended up right back.

But anyway, 13, the reason I had. Made it as far as I did and gone as far as I did, is because of this lost boy situation that happened to be happening around the exact same time. Mm-hmm. While their chaos was on the other side of the highway and a whole different di type of crazy was gone going on over there.

They were my friends. I saw them all the time, a lot of times in the middle of the night and I, yeah, I was drinking in the desert at 13. And you just end up kind of jumping in the back of one of the boys' trucks one day and going down to hurricane because they. Or like, let's go. And I was like, okay. And, and then I made it as far as hurricane and I, I had a group of friends down there.

I've been staying there, down there with them for a little while. 13 year olds do dumb things. Okay. They don't think things through, I did not think this whole situation all the way through, but I, one of my friends had this. Brilliant idea that her and her family were going on vacation. I think they were leaving for like a week.

She's like, I'm just gonna leave my window open. You can sneak in after we're gone, and then you can stay here while we're gone. And it'll give you a safe place to stay for a week. Makes perfect sense. To a 13-year-old right, to a 13-year-old, like perfect to a. Like pretty quickly I found out, of course the neighbors are gonna know that that family's on vacation and there shouldn't be somebody in the house.

So I ended up, that police called arrested. I got breaking and entry theft, damage of property theft I guess 'cause I'd eaten some of their food. The damage of property was, 'cause the screen on the window was broken, which I didn't do, but fine. I could totally see how it looked like I did that and.

You know, breaking and entering. So I, at 13 years old, got breaking and entering and destruction of property charges for breaking into somebody's house in the middle of the night. The, those parents had no idea who I was or who was in their house. Of course, they get the call and say. Who's in your house?

And they're like, nah, nah. So I was just a 13-year-old that broke into somebody's house in the middle of the night. Right, right. Luckily, my friend sorted that out with her parents. They dropped that, but at that point this other ball had already, well, rolling. I got taken to, I believe it was the crisis center at the time.

They'd take me to the crisis center and I had to go talk to a judge the next morning. But then there's a part of me that thinks I went straight to juvenile detention, so I don't Memory. Memory blurred there. Yep. Mm-hmm. So I went to juvenile detention maybe. Anyway, I saw the judge the next morning, and this is kind of where I put my foot down, I guess for the first time.

I told the judge straight up, I said, if you send me home, I'm just gonna run away again. And he was like, well, that's not gonna work. And and I got sentenced to juvenile detention for two weeks for my crimes. I will see you back in two weeks. And during this time he had assigned a guardian ad litem.

Mm-hmm. Angela Adams. I hear she's a judge now, which is super cool. 'cause I love her. I love her. That woman saved my life changed my life. That's she was how I got out. So he assigned a guardian ad litem to my case the two weeks while I was in there. And then I came out, judge asked me, how was your two weeks in detention?

And I said, it was great. Honestly, it was awesome. One of the best two weeks of my life and I, I'm happy to go back. I'll live there till I'm 18. Can I stay? And the judge was like, no, that's not gonna work either. And he asked Angela Adams, I don't remember exact words, but basically said, she said that, that doesn't really surprise me that she feels that way.

I have was able to do some digging and find that there is a history of abuse in the family and there is a lot going on. And I've also talked to other family members and found a condit, something that I think will work better for her. And I ended up getting. Custody placed with my grandmother, who was my mom's mom.

Okay. And I went to go live with her. Where was that? So they have a sanctuary ranch. It's owned by the, I think it's still owned by the a EB but it's out in Utah Desert 90 miles west of Delta, 90 miles north of. Milford, 90 miles east of Ely and 90 miles south of Windover. Drop a pin as far into the middle of nowhere as you can possibly get.

Closest gas station was 89 miles away. So was your grandma living in polygamy at the time when they sent you to her? She the polygamist religion? Yes. The ranch was a part of the, the polygamist religion there. It was, oh wait, no. Maybe what. I don't remember. I, I think it was just my grandpa and my grandpa living there at the time.

My grandpa had had more than one wife, but it was one of those situations where one wife moved on, another one lived in a different house. I'm pretty sure it was just my grandma and my grandpa living there. But my grandpa did have more than one wife and they were part of their own polygamous religion there.

And the rest of the people living on the ranch were as well, and went to the Polys church there. Attend meetings and of course trying to encourage me to get baptized into that one and all that stuff. Yeah. So but definitely a better state than you were in when you were at home. Better with your dad.

Oh yeah. Your step mom. Yeah, definitely. And the house there was super cool. It was designed in a way where the upstairs was one house and the downstairs was another. Totally. Inclusive properties on their own. And then there's a split, love a little den off to the side. And that's where I lived. And I had a door that went into this house and a door that went into that house.

And I could go into my aunt's house whenever I wanted and I could go to my grandma's house whenever I wanted. And I lived in both, but neither. And I got kind of a taste of kind of how to live on my own. And my aunt, she's an incredible human being, was like, we're gonna. You know, help encourage you to live on your own.

She's like, I know how you are and I know how your dad is, and I know that when you go back and she knew that it was gonna be when too. She knew that the system has a way of, you do the right things, you go through the right steps, check the boxes, your check the boxes, check the boxes, you can get your kids back.

She knew I was gonna be going back. And I did. She was right and she says, I also know that you're gonna run away again. She did know that she was right. She did. She was right. But during the two years, nearly two years that I lived there, I, I gained a lot of learning how to live on my own. And learning how to do things a lot better than I did the first couple attempts that didn't work out so well.

Yeah. But she's offering to help you develop skills so that when you do leave again, you'll be okay. You'll be a little bit more self-sufficient. Is that right? Yeah. And unfortunately, due to. Aspects of the A UB, which they, all of them have their own different, I call 'em levels of crazy. Mm-hmm. Different colors of crazy.

Some of 'em, you know, no contact sports. And some of them we don't allow families to communicate families outside of the religion. And anyway, so this whole sanctuary ranch thing was you kind of had to be a good person and part of the religion to live there. And if you did anything bad or they decided that you were unclean, you could not be on it.

And. They couldn't, I dunno, there's a lot of really weird rules with all that. I won't go into all that, but my aunt also knew that she wasn't gonna be able to help me again. Mm-hmm. When I went back and then I left again. That be due to her hands being tied. Right. And my grandma knew this as well. Their hands being tied with the religion they were in there wasn't gonna be a lot that they could do for me.

So they really just kind of prepared me for what they knew I was gonna do. And yeah, I went back to my dad's again. Didn't last very long. Left again. Ages fif from 15 when I left my grandma's house to 18. I was angry. I was angry. I was still angry. There's a lot of anger there, and I got into the substance abuse stuff.

Luckily not drugs, never touched that one. I was smoking, I was drinking my six, the ages between 16 and 17. I call it my blackout summer. I was drunk most of the time. I know for sure I had alcohol poisoning once, possibly twice in the. In this timeframe from the time I left my dad's again, i, I'd say lived on my own from 16 to 18, but that, I know that's not really true.

I, of course, I didn't live by myself and didn't do things by myself. I, I landed with others, but I largely landed with the Lost Boys. I was staying at homes that they were living in. I was going where my friends were going at at the time. I didn't really, because that was familiar and it made it feel not so lonely probably, I would think.

I just feel like I was just my friends or they kind of understood where you were coming from. My friends. Yeah. Yeah. I, it was a safe place to be. They're like, you stay here and we'll just figure this out once we care of each other. Yeah. Mostly they took care of me. They were really good guys. They really were.

And it largely was just a bunch of boys. There was one time where I was living in a house in downtown St. George. There was 17 boys in the house and then me and, it. I, it was just, it was mostly just the boys and they were good guys. Like you'd think you're living as a, a little, a cute little teenage girl in a house full of teenage boys.

It would be a, could be a problem environment. It was the opposite. They were all my big brothers. They lucked out for me. They were good guys. They're good people. They're all, they were a lot of good people. So. But we drank a lot. We all had something we were a little angry about. Yeah. And we all had things we were running away from.

I think sometimes when we're hurt so deeply, it comes out as anger when you're that age. 'cause it's confusing to you why X, y, and Z happened. And so instead of trying to figure that out, it's easier to just numb it out. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. There is, there was a lot of things that I should not have done. I definitely made a lot of mistakes, but burned a lot of bridges during that time.

But there really wasn't any family there. But it felt good being with a bunch of people who, their families never showed up either. Nobody came looking for them either. And in that window of time, there was one of my uncles, one of my dad's brothers, that came and knocked on the door, blew my mind. Like how he had found me, no idea why he had shown up anything, but I was so afraid that he was coming to take me home and he wasn't.

He wanted to know what he could do to help and he was how I got a car and was able to drive and get a job and the the risks that he took for me or crazy. I look back on it. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but I look back on it now. I was driving as an unlicensed teenage driver. But his dad would not sign for a driver's license for me, and you can't until you're 18 if your parents won't.

So I did not have a driver's license. The vehicle was registered and insured in his name and he was taking all responsibility and just gave me a car and said, here you go. And allowed me to drive it around with his name on it. I look back on it now and I'm like, holy crap. I don't know why he did that, but I didn't.

I never got him in any trouble. It never came back on him. So yeah, it worked out. But yeah, he really put his like neck out there for me. His neck out there for me. Yeah. He just showed up one day and said, sounds like you were blessed enough to have a couple of people in your family that even though they probably didn't fully agree with your choices, were there to help you to make the best of the situation that you were in.

Yeah. Like that's, that's kind of my dad brother at the time feels like angelic a little bit, you know, like they're little angels on earth watching out for you. They were all going through their own stuff too. Yeah. Like, and a lot of that, like I said, I had to figure out later a lot of the pain as a teenager was like, why does it feel like nobody cares?

Like why every, nobody came into rescue us. Like during these years, the, my family all the way around me, the entire community, all the way around me, like. Whole church, hundreds, thousands of people, and they knew what was going on and nobody did anything about it. But to find out later, a lot of, you know, the people that cared coming back and saying, I wanted to, I wished I could, I couldn't because, and find out the things that were happening to them and what their hands were tied with, and the manipulations that they were under and why they weren't allowed to.

And it makes you feel a lot better. But at the time, I did not, I did not feel better. It's like no one cares. Yeah. But yeah, this, this particular uncle that put his, his neck out for me, finding out he went out of his way to try to do things and the things that he was going through at the time too. And my dad's siblings went through a lot too.

I mean, my dad learned it from somewhere all, yeah, my, all of my dad's siblings went through some serious levels of abuse from their dad. There were, there was a lot of awful going on throughout the whole family, and it was, they all were in their own little versions of hell. Yeah. Okay. So now you're living with the Lost Boys in what, from the age of 16 to 18?

Yeah. Well, it started out 16 was the summer of like 15, 16. Very much living with a bunch of the lost boys. Then the most of the age of 16, there was one particular, one of the boys I started dating and I lived with him. Him and his brother and his mom and his mom had ended up leaving. Anyway, I lived with them for a while.

Then. Kind of went back into one of the Lost Boys homes again after that. But for a good chunk of it, I actually was dating somebody and I lived with one of the boys, particularly for a good year or so. But the before and after it in 15 and 17 were bouncing around a lot. And then two weeks before I turned 18, I got pregnant.

Because we're teenagers that don't think through our, our decisions. Right. Best thing that ever happened to me, I all the time, I don't tell people like, you know, it was teenage pregnancy or anything that makes it remotely sound like a mistake. Like not a mistake. Best thing I ever did in my life, my daughter saved my life.

Hmm. It honestly really was, I look at the kids that I was running around with at the time. Sorry, I'm gonna cry for them. Knowing where a lot of 'em ended up. Like the kids that I were running was running around with the track that I was on, the path that I was on, where I was going was nothing good.

And some of those boys ended up. Dying de overdosing. One of 'em wrapped his car around a tree drunk. Another one actually that was a drunk driving too, but it was on I 15 and some of them came out okay. Most, a lot of the girls, the stuff that I see, the struggles that they went through and where they're at now, like.

I don't know. None of it. It could have been you. Yeah, I a lot, some of them really turned around and did a lot of good things. Some of them didn't make it to their 21st birthday and I am sure that I probably would've ended up some in one of the not good situations 'cause I didn't, I didn't care. I didn't care what happened to me.

I hated myself so much between 15 and 18. My worst enemy was me for sure. I absolutely hated myself. I didn't care what happened to me. I could care less if the alcohol poisoning took me, they wanted to take me to the hospital. I'm like, yeah, whatever happens happens. If I die, I die. I, I didn't care.

And, and so let's talk about how your daughter saved your life. I wanna talk about that. I mother instincts, whatever kicked in and I'm done. No, no, no more drinking, no more smoking time to like figure this out. And unfortunately, the relationship was not a good one. We did try to do the whole, you know, stay together because you're pregnant, make it work, whatever.

It was a relationship that just shouldn't have happened. We didn't have enough in common. It was almost like a forced relationship. We didn't even have the chance to figure out that we, we didn't belong together, weren't compatible. We forced it and we forced each other to live together and we forced to, to make it work for the baby's sake type thing.

And then it lasted a minute. I left around the time my daughter was one. But it really always, even through all of that, was completely trying to defend her and do the right thing for her and what she needed, and everything just became about her. That was one of his biggest problems with me. He was like, you were so much fun, and then you get pregnant and you're boring and you don't want do anything.

I'm like, no, I wanna stay home and I wanna take care of my baby. That's all I wanted to do because you wanna do what you didn't get to have happen for you. So you had decided that. You were gonna do better for her than what you had? Well, unfortunately, I, one of the things that I've learned is from the memories that I do not have between zero and five were actually good.

My mom was an amazing mom. She was so good to us. I had no idea until I was in my thirties. The kind of woman that my mom was. She was the kind of person everyone loved. She was so good to her kids. Her kids were her entire world. Everything was about them. She'd talk about 'em constantly. Everybody that I've talked to is, yeah, your mom wouldn't talk about anything but her kids.

You were her whole world. And I ended up learning that the day that. They went on that, that trip. And the, my, my mom never came back. The last conversation that she had with several different people was that she was gonna go tell my dad that she wanted a divorce. Mm-hmm. She wanted to leave. She didn't want to be there anymore.

Which led to a whole nother grieving cycle of anger, and I was super upset because now whatever decision she had made that had led to her deciding that she didn't wanna be here anymore or made a decision that accidentally led to her not being here anymore. She went from not wanting to be in this situation and not wanting to be with my dad and wanting to leave my dad to just leaving us in it, and she wasn't even there to protect us anymore.

I'm like, why did you do that to us? But. My mom was a good mom and it makes me happy today knowing that people tell me that I'm a lot like her. Mm-hmm. Because as a child I was you, I was told that you are just like your mother as an insult. Mm-hmm. Every time I was defiant, every time I didn't want to accept the rules.

It was you're just like your mother. I always thought it was a bad thing. I was probably 30 when I learned that. Being told I'm just like, my mother was a compliment. That's beautiful. So yeah, my daughter definitely is what turned my life around. Getting pregnant was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Okay, so we're gonna have a part 2, 3, 4, however long it takes. That's our time for today. But I thank you so much for being here and, and starting this story. And so when we come back. Because I'm gonna have you back. When we come back, I want you to pick up with your daughter. Okay. I wanna start there because I know that there's more to this story, there's more, you know, stuff that you went through before you came out on the other side with this beautiful kindness and motion project that you have.

Yeah. So I, can we talk about that just a little bit, just to kind of give people like a little idea of what it is? Yeah. So that they can kinda look you up and see. What it is that you're doing with that, and then we'll get back to your story in our next podcast with you. So kindness and motion is kind of hard to simplify quickly because there's a lot of what we do.

But the best way to summarize it is community connection. We are all about trying to connect people in need to the people that need help. And it's all about trying to bring back the village. We all work together, love each other, take care of each other, look out for one another, and in summary, kindness in motion, because I believe that.

Spreading more love and kindness in the world is what's gonna help us all heal. Yeah, I, I agree. I agree. It goes right along with what we like to do here at Irene and helping people to heal so that they can get to a place where. They can help other people in some way, shape, or form. Thank you so much Tanise, for sharing the first little snippet of your story with us, and we'll have you back soon.

Okay. To share more. Thank you for listening to the Irene podcast. Tanis is going to come back and we're going to hear more about her story and how she's become this most beautiful, amazing person that she is. We, we got to talk with her a little bit yesterday and after we met with her, I was so excited to have her on because she's just this beautiful light and spirit in this world, and I'm so grateful for what she's doing and I'm, I'm excited to be a part of what she's doing and.

Please leave a comment below if her story has resonated with you. If you have questions, leave us some questions. Maybe she can answer 'em when she comes back. But always remember that no matter what has happened, you can always heal and be better. God bless.