Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (19 page)

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, Dad came to me and told me I needed to talk to Mom. "Your mother is a contentious woman," he said. "All she does is start arguments." My father said to do it for my mother's sake.

Nobody else knew about the fighting but Taylor and me, and Dad knew it was my duty as a newly baptized member of the church to report the rule-breaking arguments that I witnessed. "I want to spare your mother the humiliation of being publicly admonished if the church finds out," he instructed me. "Please just tell her to stop."

I found Mom when she was alone in the kitchen cooking dinner. I was embarrassed and scared that she'd be mad at me, but I knew I had to do it.

"Mom, I need to talk to you. Dad wants me to talk to you about something."

Turning toward me, she looked like a deer caught in the headlights, sensing that I obviously had something important to discuss.

"Dad's been worried about you for a long time," I told her. "He asked me to talk to you in hopes that it would help. He feels you are way too contentious, and if you don't change, he will have to tell someone in the church."

The conversation was incredibly emotional. I was crying as I told her that she was not allowed to bring things up against Dad anymore, even in the privacy of our own home. Mom was upset and angry, but I told her that Dad had asked me to speak to her because he was afraid that if things didn't change, she was going to be humiliated in front of the congregation. I hated being caught in the middle. Dad was putting me between him and my mother, and he was also making me a conspirator in his sin by asking me to keep their arguments secret. After that, in my mother's eyes I had taken Dad's side, so she seemed to favor Taylor.

The arguments continued, even after that. However, I honored Dad's desire to protect Mom. To be in full compliance with the church's standards, I would have had to bring up my parents' arguing to the elders. Then, Shirley and Margie would have suspicions about the conduct in our house, which would then call into question both of my parents' memberships. I knew I should be telling on them both, knowing the consequences of my secrecy might be an eternity in the part of hell reserved for evil coconspirators like me. But that was the risk I took.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts; and be ready always to give an
answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with
meekness and fear.

--1 Peter 3:15

Throughout high school, I lived a tightly controlled life. Teenage girls not in the church experimented with makeup, looked at cute boys, went on dates, and danced at the prom. The teenagers within the church were expected to focus on daily picketing, school, and part-time jobs. We were also supposed to help our parents by contributing to the family finances and babysitting the younger children. At first I resented it, but eventually suppression started to feel more like support. Most of the church members seemed so cheerful and friendly in their judgments of me that it didn't feel like they were condemning me, and I really was trying to learn the right ways. Compared to my house arrest in Florida, I felt like I had a lot more freedoms now. I could go to the movies, have a cell phone, borrow the car, travel to pickets without my parents, and hang out at my friends' houses. These freedoms came with heavy monitoring, but that didn't really bother me. The longer I was there, the more I bought into the concept that if I needed to be corrected, these were expressions of love. Sometimes I had a fleeting wish that I could have a boyfriend, or at least talk to some of the guys in school, but I wouldn't have traded anything for my support system in the church.

I loved sports and being athletic, so the fact that physical fitness was a priority in the church was great. The pastor demanded that we respect our bodies like temples, as stated in the Bible. At one time, the pastor had been overweight himself, but he had overcome what he'd seen as a weakness of character and was now a health nut who insisted everybody in the congregation partake in an exercise program of some sort, although I noticed that different people interpreted this regulation differently. As evidenced by the range of body sizes among church members, the fitness program was self-administered, not official.

Megan and I frequently exercised together, from practicing in front of an exercise/belly-dancing DVD in her bedroom to running a five-mile loop from the house to the high school football field and back. If we didn't have much time, we'd do laps on the track in the yard, where sixteen laps made a mile.

We liked to run every day because we were cross-country runners on the high school track team. We traveled with our teammates on the school bus for the meets. Nobody bothered us about being Westboro members, and we didn't try to incite controversy unless we were picketing. Sometimes I'd run five to ten miles on my own, loving the freedom of just being out of the house for a while. As long as I carried my cell phone, Mom allowed it. The pastor, Fred Jr., and Shirley's husband, Brent, were marathoners. Fred and Brent would take anyone who was interested on cross-country runs in the park areas of Topeka on the weekends, sign us up for local races, and help us keep fit.

Except for the girls on the track team, Jael, Megan, Bekah, and I associated only with one another at school. This had an upside and a downside. I liked having a close circle of friends, but I still felt they treated me like an outsider in many ways. The fact that they were all related to one another but not to me left me feeling their loyalties didn't lie with me.

Another thing that made me really insecure was when I found out that members of the church had been meeting for group Bible studies that excluded the Drains. Those times that Dad, Mom, Taylor, and I had been meeting for family Bible studies, the rest of the church members were having community Bible studies, but nobody had taken the initiative to include us. I didn't know if it was just an oversight or a deliberate lack of goodwill, but my insecurity had me leaning toward the latter. It felt kind of mean to me. Certain older members of the church never warmed up to my family; they just ignored us, even on Sundays when we were in the sanctuary.

We were the only family that had ever come from a distance. In fact, we were one of the only outside families to ever arrive. The feeling was that we would probably be the last. Two other Topeka families, the Hockenbargers and the Davises, had joined in the early years of the church. Everyone else in the congregation was a child of Fred Phelps, a spouse, or one of the pastor's forty grandchildren, including my friends Megan, Libby, Bekah, and Jael.

The Phelpses had resigned themselves to the belief that no one else was coming. On the other hand, we were the chosen ones, predestined for God's kingdom, so whoever else was on the outside, let them be damned. God's tree had been shaken, and all the bad leaves had fallen off.

Eventually, after the congregation trusted that we were sincere, most people accepted us. We started going to the church-wide Bible studies in addition to our regular family Bible study. I joined the community group without any resentment about not being invited sooner. I didn't want to raise the issue that I'd felt left out, because I didn't want to be criticized for being envious.

Besides, I really enjoyed the group study. A whole bunch of us would get together according to age. The young people went to Sam's house on Wednesday evenings after dinner. Sam, Shirley's oldest son, was a cool guy with his own house, so that was fun. Megan, Jael, Bekah, and I joined the other young people in his living room and discussed passages from the Bible. The oldest male in attendance was always the first to read, then we'd go clockwise around the room with every person reading a chapter.

Sometimes, Sam would serve us snacks, but usually, we just studied the Bible.

I looked up to all the Phelps girls, even though I was sometimes uncomfortable when they overemphasized their status as the pastor's grandchildren and became boastful and entitled. As a strategy, I tried to model my behavior after theirs, figuring that would be a good way to keep myself out of trouble, but some of their actions perplexed me. For example, Megan and Jael both dressed more provocatively than I thought was allowed, which confused me. If they hated boys, and they hated attention, then why were they wearing such revealing clothes? Megan would wear tight, low-cut shirts and then get upset about the reaction. "Some boy called me hot today," she would complain. "I hate when boys do that. It's so nasty."

Sometimes Jael would wear tight pants and heels to school. The church didn't have a dress code, but
modesty
was the operative word. Some of the clothes the girls wore might not have seemed inappropriate to other people, but they weren't modest.

My mother took it to the extreme, considering anything tight to be immodest.

My shorts needed to be at least to my knees, my pants needed to be baggy, and if something I was wearing showed even an inch of skin or revealed my figure, my mother would throw it out. Church people would complain about certain outfits they saw us wearing. Sometimes it was Megan. Sometimes it was Jael, and sometimes it was me. My mom would freak out if people commented about me. She needed me to be perfect.

Meanwhile, Megan would talk about her body and the size of her breasts.

She was always working on her abs. At school, she was quite the exhibitionist, wanting to exercise in the hallway in some tiny exercise outfit or show off some of the belly-dancing moves we had learned at her house in front of our classmates. Sometimes, I'd join in at her urging. She would also walk the line by wearing low-cut or snug tops, and she was always fussing with her hair. The church mandated that we were not supposed to be focusing on our outward appearances, so this seemed to me like a pretty flagrant violation, but she got away with it. It always struck me as unfair that she pranced around worrying about her looks and being on television, either caught on camera at a picket or at a scheduled interview. Maybe I was jealous of her. She told me once that sometimes she felt competitive with me because we were the same age, both ran track, and took the same classes.

Megan and I liked shopping for clothes together, and we shopped at the same stores, Target and Walmart. At Megan's urging, we bought a lot of matching short skirts and tops. She'd spend a lot of time in the dressing room, sizing herself up in the mirror. I loved Megan, but I was beginning to think she was a little vain. One time, she wanted us to wear wedge heels and identical shorts to school. She had picked them out at the store and bought them for us. Shirley found out about it and came to me very upset, telling me I was such a bad influence on her daughter. She said Megan would never wear anything like that without my encouragement.

Shirley didn't seem to think a kid of hers could ever do wrong, so if we were wearing something inappropriate, it had to have been my idea. Megan knew her mother was scolding me for something that was her fault, but she didn't step in to take responsibility. For once, my father defended me. "It's not that big a deal," he told Shirley. "They're wearing shorts, but they are not that immodest, as long as they're covering everything." But Shirley would have none of it and still blamed me.

This favoritism was really starting to bother me. Shirley didn't seem to have the capacity to humble herself enough to see faults in her own children.

Every kid got reamed out by her, except her own. She would rip me up in public and in private, telling me to be less vain, more humble, less conceited, more obedient, less selfish, and more worthy. She'd accuse me of wanting guys to look at me. Meanwhile, her daughter's cleavage would be sticking out of her blouse as she flirted with guys who approached her at pickets. I kept my issue with it to myself, deciding that I would most likely be scolded for being jealous if I said anything.

Soon, Mom and Dad both started cracking down on me. No spaghetti straps, no push-up bras, no tank tops, no shorts. My mother was still throwing away clothes that she didn't like, even sometimes hunting in my closet for forbidden items. She'd make sure I saw what she had taken by leaving them at the top of the wastebasket in my room. It was so unfair. Taylor's wardrobe was safe, because Mom bought all of her clothes, but the one last thing in my life I could possibly control was my wardrobe. I couldn't cut or style my hair, paint my nails, date boys, or have any time to myself except on my runs.

My clothes were all that was left, and my mother took that away from me, too.

My parents monitored everything: my e-mails, my Internet use, even my cell phone history. Every single second of my day was monitored. Any time I drove anywhere, I had to carry my cell phone so my parents could call me. If I wasn't at school, I was doing chores for the church or my family. The chores increased substantially after my brother Boaz was born.

We were ecstatic to welcome him into the family. Dad, Taylor, and I were in the hospital room throughout Mom's labor and delivery, so we were part of Boaz's birth experience. Dad was so excited to have a boy. I always thought he wanted me to be a boy, since he had signed me up for every sport possible, he taught me to be supercompetitive, and he wanted me to be interested in all the guy stuff he loved--rock and roll music, construction, basketball, softball. If he liked it, he wanted me to like it, too, but now he had Boaz. I wasn't jealous in the least--instead, I was more happy for my father that he had finally gotten his boy. My baby brother looked exactly like Dad from the moment he was born.

Not long after we brought Boaz home from the hospital, we had to put down our dog, Buddy, who'd moved with us from Florida. He was getting senile, and he was snapping at Boaz. Nobody else in the family wanted to be in the room with the veterinarian, so I volunteered to be by Buddy's side to comfort him while the doctor gave him the injection. It was a pretty emotional day, and I was sad for a long time afterward.

Taylor and I loved having Boaz around. He was a really funny kid and he never whined. My mother used me as her main caregiver, which was really stressful for me. The moment I picked up Boaz from the church's day care, I was on duty. He had a delightful disposition, but he was really active, so I had very little down time. I had to feed and change him while I was doing my homework.