When I was growing up, in the late 1960s and early seventies, I thought I came from a normal, tight-knit family. My mom, Jill Franklin, and her sister Lois married two brothers: my dad, Ken, and his brother Chet. Dad had been a football player. Mom was a cheerleader. My mom had three babies, and then my aunt had three too—each sister giving birth one after the other. Three boys and three girls with the same set of grandparents. We were more like brothers and sisters. Idyllic, right?

Patti, center, with, from left, her older sister Nancy, mom Jill, and little brother, Billy, circa 1968 Courtesy of Jill Franklin

Well, by the time I was six, everyone was divorced.

Blame it on the copy of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique my dad gave Mom, or blame it on the era. I was born during the height of radical change and the women's and sexual freedom movements. In many ways, blowing up a traditional family made sense for the time.

In 1970 we moved from our perfect red house in Eastchester, New York, to an apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx with Mom. Our playground was our tar-roofed balcony. I loved it there. And we would still see my dad Wednesday nights and go to the Berkshires with our uncle and cousins every weekend. Despite the divorce, there was still a semblance of continuity and security. Until…

‘Ma Satya Bharti, divine mother of truth’

In the late sixties, a spiritual leader named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was becoming a popular lecturer in India. Americans began traveling east to learn more about Bhagwan's unique brand of spirituality, which combined wealth, free sex, and enlightenment, all at once. By the seventies Bhagwan had created an ashram—a spiritual community—in the city of Pune in India.

After my parents divorced, I started having this dream that my sister, Nancy, and I were driving our family's blue Volvo together. Nancy would steer the wheel while sitting up on her knees and I would press the gas pedal with my hands. In my dream we were always trying to control the vehicle, but it was swerving out of control. It was an apt metaphor for our life, which was starting to spin out.

In Riverdale, life was less structured. When it was freezing outside, Mom would warm the apartment up by opening the oven doors while we got dressed for school.

I remember coming home from third grade one day and taking the rickety, four-person elevator up to our top-floor apartment. I opened the big wooden doors and called "Mooooom!" as I headed down the long, arched hallway. "Mooooom!" I found her kneeling in the bathroom in front of a steaming tub of water filled with orange dye. She turned to me and a tangerine halo, glow reflecting from the water, lit up her face. I later found out that the Rajneeshees wore orange, or pink and magenta, because the colors were said to represent happiness, joy, and laughter. They were also the color of the sun—and of the chakra, or sexual energy.

"Hi sweetie," she said. "Today I took Sannyasin"—the ritual of taking a new name and accepting Bhagwan as your guru—"My new name is Ma Satya Bharti. It means divine mother of truth. Isn't it beautiful?"