Old Memories Resurface — Meri Brown Gets Emotional Over Brother’s Past Marriage to Janelle Before Kody

Years after leaving her plural marriage to Kody Brown behind, the Sister Wives star, 55, continues to navigate the impact that polygamy had on her life. In PEOPLE’s exclusive sneak peek at the upcoming episode, which airs on Sunday, Jan. 25, Meri admits that she “had a lot of emotions” about how former sister wife Janelle came into the family.

“Well, people don’t —  I’m not just going to say people, I’m going to say Kody — Kody and Janelle fail to recognize that possibly some of the issues that I had in polygamy could have stemmed from the fact that, oh, they wanted to get married on my birthday,” she says. “They had planned to get married on my birthday.”

She claims that Kody, 57, and Janelle, 56, thought “it doesn’t matter, we’ll just celebrate [Meri’s birthday] a different day,” but Kody’s mom ultimately stepped in and shut the idea down.

“Like, excuse me? It does matter,” Meri notes. “So let’s start the marriage relationship, the family relationship, with that. And they forget that there might have been some emotions involved with the fact that she used to be married to my brother.”

Before becoming sister wives, Meri and Janelle were actually sisters-in-law, as Janelle was married to Meri’s older brother Adam Barber.

“There’s a lot of emotion,” Meri says at the end of the preview. “There is a lot of emotion!”

In the Jan. 4 episode of the TLC series, Janelle and Meri sat down for coffee and discussed their previous familial connection. Janelle explained that she met Barber when she was a senior in high school and they tied the knot a little over a year later, although it didn’t last long.

“She’d been married to my brother and she was actually at my wedding with him,” Meri revealed, who was the first sister wife to wed Kody in 1990. “And then they divorced after Kody and I got married.”

While Janelle said the short-lived marriage “wasn’t really a thing” and “didn’t really matter,” Meri felt otherwise.

“When the conversation about Janelle coming into our family started happening, it was really hard for me,” Meri shared on the episode.

“It was a tough thing to wrap my head around on multiple levels just because she had been married to my brother, you know?” she continued. “And so it was definitely a thing for me, for sure.”

Janelle married Kody in 1993 and they split in 2022. He also separated from wife Christine Brown — who joined the family in 1994 — in 2021, as well as Meri in 2023. The former polygamist’s only remaining relationship is with wife Robyn Brown, whom he married in 2014.