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Music Hello, and as always, welcome to the sister wives professor. That is me. I am Dr. Adam, real life professor of communication focusing on interpersonal and family dynamics, how families talk to each other, and how people in relationships relate to each other, especially as it relates to identity and sort of how we communicatively construct who we are. I don't really talk that much about my research anymore because I'm just kind of talking about the show in case people want to find out. Anyway, I'm Dr. Adam.

Thank you so much for making me a small, but hopefully positive part of your day. I definitely

appreciate it very, very much. I'm always happy to go back to old seasons of sister wives,

and I'm very excited about the new season, but we're continuing season five with episode two of

season five titled Cody Beggs for an answer, which is part of the episode. It's not really the main thrust of the episode, but we'll get to that at kind of the very end. But yeah, if you are a patron or a subscriber on Apple, hopefully you've heard the book club podcast with myself and my brilliant and lovely wife, Dr. Amanda, where we talk not just about Christine's book, but also how we met Christine at that book signing. I've gotten a lot of good feedback on that. So if you've heard it and given any good feedback, thank you so much. And I've got more stuff coming up, of course, including here on the free feed. So let's get to that. Talk about the episode, Sister Wives, Season 5, Episode 2, Cody begs for an answer. While the adults are on the couch to start off the episode, and Cody is still on that denim

cowboy shirt from last time, and he's contrasting the secrecy that a lot of his wives

grew up with compared to how they are now all so very public.

Christine talks about her grandfather, being split up and put in jail, how the whole family

had to disperse and the impact

that had on her dad was a big thing that she brought up early on in her book. As a matter of fact, and just as a reminder, I did mention this last week, but this is the week I'm going to start threading in spoilers from Christine's book as it comes up naturally. I'm not going to give a whole review of the book here because I already did that on the book club podcast. But if you haven't

heard the book or read the book, I've done both. I both listened to the audiobook, which Christine did a great job on, and I've read it, because this is kind of my job. And also, I would have done that anyway. Let's be real, I would have done that anyway, but I am going to just drop things in as they're relevant. So heads up about that.

But Cody, as we know, really wanted to be recognized as one I would have done that anyway, but I am gonna just drop things in as they're relevant.

So heads up about that. But Cody, as we know, really wanted to be recognized as one big cohesive family. And we see a lot of flashbacks and old family footage in this episode, which I really like. And right now we see some Christmas stuff. Mary holding a baby, likely Leon, but could have been a different baby. And it's always interesting, by the way, to see the early Christmases, because Cody's interest or lack of interest in Christmas stands out to me because Robin ends up framing it throughout the series as Cody didn't want to do

Christmas. And because of Robin, she kind of created Brown Family Christmas or sort of resuscitated it

and brought it back. And that very well may be, but she really loves to bring that up as evidence that she was kind of an important and vital and positive part of the Brown family culture. And that may very well be the case, but what I know is more interesting to me and it's probably more interesting to you is the fact that Robin likes to bring it up, that Robin is making that talk about identity, that Robin makes that a really important part of her identity, especially early on in the family, or her integration in the family, I guess I should say. Well, another thing we know is the Brown's used to homeschool. We see Christine pregnant with truly very, very early on the show, probably footage from the pilot, and they're still talking about the legal repercussions for Cody, potentially, because of their lifestyle. This is all to set up that the adults are assembling, Cody wearing his button down and jacket, to go to the parent-teacher conference. And Cody says, because he's dressed to Janelle's taste so nicely, he's seen how some teachers dress, and he doesn't want them to be dressed better than him. Of course, that is a competition, right? Woof. And yet, Cody still doesn't wear a tie, dress shirt, button down, slacks, no tie. It has been a very long time since I've complained about this. If you're like an OG sister wives professor, listener, I don't like to say fan because I feel like that's too much of a power difference. You're just as, you're more important actually in this than I am. But if you're an OG listener, you know I really don't like the jacket, dress shirt, slacks combo. I always say take off the jacket if you don't want to wear a tie, but ideally you wear a tie either way. Just irritates me. And nobody seems to agree with me so I stopped bringing it up but you know what

I do what I want and I'm in a bad mood I'm not in a bad mood with you but everything else other than my

family is irritating me so I'm just going to go ahead and complain I don't like the way the guy looks

I just don't put on a tie you schmuck well anyway like I said the whole point about polygamy and

homeschooling that they've

been talking about, it's just to build up to how rare it is that polygamous parents would be going to a high school, public high school, parent-teacher conference together. Robin says it's very likely the school has never had five parents for one kid, which is certainly possible. That might be a first. Mary's nervous. She's hesitant, even though they've been public for quite some time.

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