7 Years Without My Children: A Mother’s True Story of Loss, Survival, and Freedom from the FLDS

**7 Years Without My Children** *A Mother’s True Story of Loss, Survival, and Freedom from the FLDS*Born into the FLDS, Mandy was taught the Prophet spoke for God and obedience was the only path to heaven. At sixteen, she entered an arranged plural marriage to a man decades older, beginning a life of control, fear, and abuse.But nothing would cost her more than obedience.As Warren Jeffs tightened control over the FLDS, families were divided and parents separated. Questioning the Prophet could mean losing everything.Eventually, Mandy did the unimaginable: at the command of church leaders, she walked away from her children, believing God required it.For seven years, she lived without them.Through diary entries from those years, Mandy reveals the agony of missing her children, begging God to make her worthy to be their mother again, and believing their separation was necessary for salvation.She didn't believe she was abandoning her children. She believed she was proving her love for God so someday she could have them forever.But slowly, cracks appeared.The “wicked world” she had been taught to fear showed her kindness. Questions became impossible to silence. Contradictions became harder to ignore. Until Mandy confronted a terrifying possibility:What if the voice she believed came from God was simply the voice of a controlling man?That question forced her to reconsider her childhood, marriages, faith, and sacrifices.Freedom brought something she had scarcely known:Peace.*7 Years Without My Children* goes behind the prairie dresses and practiced smiles into a world where fear disguises itself as faith and suffering as righteousness.It is the story of a mother who never stopped loving her children—and a woman who learned that questions were not wicked, truth could withstand examination, and love should never require cruelty.A story of motherhood, indoctrination, awakening, grief, and freedom.**Seven years separated us. Love never did.**