i left my parents’ home when i was fourteen years old.

we’d struggled financially for as long as i could remember, and somewhere along the way, i’d begun to interpret my own presence as another expense my parents had to manage. another person to feed, clothe, shelter, and provide for when there never seemed to be quite enough.

in my adolescent mind, the solution seemed painfully straightforward: perhaps life would be easier for everyone if i wasn’t there.

so i left.

what remains difficult to reconcile is that my parents didn’t stop me.

i went to indianapolis to live with my aunt, an arrangement that lasted approximately a year before it, too, came apart. by fifteen, i was largely navigating life on my own, learning through necessity what many people acquire gradually within the relative security of a dependable home.

independence became less an aspiration than a condition of survival. i learned to teach myself, improvise solutions, and acquire whatever knowledge a particular circumstance demanded. resourcefulness became an essential part of my identity, but beneath that independence was an enduring desire for something i’d struggled to experience consistently.

belonging.

i imagined creating a large, interdependent family in which nobody would have to question whether their presence represented a burden. a household where people could share resources, nurture one another, and feel secure in their place, regardless of what they possessed or contributed.

long before i met ashley, i’d begun considering plural marriage as one possible expression of that vision.

when we met, i shared the idea on our first date. i’ve always possessed a certain east coast directness, and when something matters to me, i’m inclined to get to the point rather than navigate an elaborate social performance.

ashley, a trilingual anthropologist who’d traveled extensively and encountered different cultural approaches to relationships and family, was receptive to exploring the possibility. what had begun as my personal vision became something we could imagine together.

for me, the aspiration wasn’t about accumulating women or pursuing sex. it was about the considerably more demanding responsibility of serving and nurturing a large family, creating an environment of emotional security, shared resources, mutual support, and genuine belonging.

i wanted to build the kind of family in which nobody would feel inadequate or unwanted.

during those same years, my professional life was developing along a seemingly different trajectory. i was designing software and systems intended to make complicated experiences more intuitive, reliable, and humane.

one project, *analytics for capture*, evaluated the confidence of information extracted through optical character recognition. when characters or fields met predetermined confidence thresholds, the information could proceed through automated workflows. when confidence was insufficient, the uncertain data was directed to a human reviewer.

the objective was to reduce unnecessary manual work while improving the experience of people submitting checks, identification documents, and other important records.

i was interested in technology sophisticated enough to recognize its own uncertainty, accommodate the limitations of automation, and preserve human judgment where it mattered most.

yet there was a contradiction developing between my professional philosophy and my personal life.

i was becoming increasingly skilled at designing systems that reduced friction for the people using them, while remaining painfully capable of introducing uncertainty, distress, and unnecessary difficulty into my closest relationships.

over time, our unconventional family became the subject of a national television program. behind the cameras were three women i called my wives, five children, the pressures of public exposure, and the increasingly complex realities of sustaining the family we’d imagined.

there were meaningful experiences and aspirations i genuinely believed in, but there were also fractures i wasn’t sufficiently humble or emotionally equipped to recognize and address.

i’d become accustomed to achieving things through intelligence, determination, and an almost relentless commitment to making my ideas materialize. those qualities served me well in technical and entrepreneurial pursuits, but human relationships required something far more nuanced than the execution of a vision.

people aren’t engineering problems. their feelings cannot be optimized into compliance, their autonomy isn’t an obstacle to overcome, and their pain doesn’t become less legitimate because someone can construct an articulate explanation for causing it.

i understood complex systems, yet i was often astonishingly incapable of recognizing what the people closest to me needed.

i could rationalize almost anything. anger became frustration, impatience became urgency, control became leadership, and cruelty could be concealed beneath elaborate explanations of my intentions.

i was unkind. i was verbally abusive. i was physically violent.

i hurt people who trusted me.

those admissions remain uncomfortable, as they should. no amount of intellectual sophistication, childhood hardship, relationship complexity, or personal suffering absolves me of responsibility for my behavior.

whatever happened between us, my decisions were mine.

eventually, the family structure i’d devoted so much energy to creating began to collapse. relationships deteriorated, finances suffered, and the identities around which i’d organized my life became increasingly difficult to sustain.

the public scrutiny made everything more complicated, but beneath it was something far more consequential than my reputation.

i was losing the people and relationships around which i’d constructed my understanding of purpose.

i’d wanted to create a family in which nobody would feel diminished, yet my own actions had caused harm to people i claimed to love. the sincerity of my original aspirations couldn’t compensate for their consequences.

and when the life i’d spent years imagining finally came apart, i was left confronting a question that no amount of intelligence, ambition, or technical ingenuity could answer for me.

who was i without the family i’d tried so desperately to build?