Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (2 page)

Our allotted picket time ended before the actual start time of the inauguration. With such a hostile crowd around us, Shirley advised us to pack up our signs and cover up our T-shirts. She wanted us to be stealthy and quick, so that as soon as we started to move, no one would recognize us in the crowd. One or two people cheered our exit, yelling at us, "Yeah, go home!"

The rental minivan was parked a good ten blocks away, but with most of the people already at the Mall, the crowd around it was thinning. We had never intended to stay for the swearing-in. Our mission had been to incite the guests in attendance, and everyone agreed we had been highly successful.

When we reached the van, I climbed in next to Rebekah and Megan. We all pulled out our cell phones and started calling home to Kansas to report back on the protest. Dad answered the phone at my house. He was always so proud of me for representing the Drains at an important event, and no event had been more important than this one. I told him I had never been in the middle of so many angry people, but I had delivered God's Word and been a respectable Christian martyr.

"I love you," he told me. "You are my little prophetess."

Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his
reward.

--Psalm 127:3

I was five years old when I was uprooted for the first time. I was just beginning school, but having skipped kindergarten, I was already in first grade. My parents had taught me how to read and write at home, and they knew I was capable, even though I was one of the youngest in the class. My mother had recently given birth to my baby sister, Taylor, so I was also getting used to sharing my parents with her when my father suddenly announced that we were moving from our home near Tampa, Florida, to Kansas. He had been accepted into the master's program in philosophy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Not only that, he was going to be paid to teach a course in Western Civilization while he pursued his degree.

I could tell Mom didn't want to go to Kansas at all, but Dad was insistent that this was best for us. She told me she hated the idea of leaving her family, who lived near us, but she tended to be more passive and was willing to do things just to please my father. Dad was very dominant, and he didn't like her family very much, which may have played a role in his decision to move us out of state and out from under their influence. Even at the time, I had the vague impression that my father wanted to control my mother by isolating her from the people who supported her.

I was in the middle of the school year when we packed up and moved to Olathe, a small city about thirty miles east of Lawrence, where Mom found a dental hygienist job, and Dad went to class, studied at home, and worked as a teaching assistant at the university. Taylor went to a university- sponsored day care, where I joined her when I was done with my school day.

Sometimes one of Dad's students would pitch in and babysit. Our first week there, Dad took me on a bike ride around the campus and showed me the different buildings that meant something to him--the humanities building where he taught, the film school, the law school, and the building that housed his office. I thought it was so cool, seeing all the students walking and biking around the campus. I quickly became an avid KU fan, and Dad encouraged my interest by taking me to all of the home basketball games.

When we were at the sports hall, we'd see the players, who were like celebrities to me, working out or doing physical therapy. Even Dad got kind of giddy when we saw them. He embraced our new life, and I think he wanted me to be as excited about Kansas as he was. He loved it when we expanded our horizons and our minds, especially on his terms.

From my earliest memories, everything I did, from dance recitals to fishing trips, was with my parents. The two, Steve and Luci Drain, had been together for what seemed like forever. They met in junior high school in Florida when they were both thirteen, and dated through all of high school.

My mother, a beautiful and slender blue-eyed blonde, loved my father, and as a good Catholic she married him so she wouldn't have to feel guilty about having sex out of wedlock. They tied the knot on May 5, 1983, as soon as they both turned eighteen.

My father rarely spoke about his early childhood with me, and when he did, he sounded quite bitter about his parents. Based on this and his strained relationships with his family, I guessed that it must have been a very unhappy childhood. He had been born in Tampa, Florida, in 1965, and named after his father, Steven Sr. His mother, Joy, was an aspiring actress who had appeared in several small roles in feature films and television commercials. She was dramatic, flamboyant, and a bit of a narcissist. From what I understood, she paid very little attention to my dad because she was obsessively focused on her acting career. She had already been married several times and had given birth to two daughters before she married my grandfather, and she remained married to him for only a short time. I had no idea how old my father was when his parents divorced or what their reasons were, but he told me he had been very angry when his parents split, and he blamed it on his mother. He said he would never forgive her. Whether or not this was true, it was clear to me that he deeply resented her.

Both of Dad's parents eventually remarried. My father lived with his mother, his two half sisters, and his stepfather, whom he called Popper. His two half sisters had different fathers, so nobody in his household had the same set of parents. It seemed like my father had had a love/hate relationship with his sisters. He was the youngest and the only boy, which made him a natural target for their sisterly teasing. The two girls played mean-spirited pranks on him all the time, which of course made him angry. He told me he was also bullied at school. He had been considered a runt until he was in sixth grade, when he shot up to six foot two. After his growth spurt, the bullying stopped.

Dad's biological father remarried a woman my father didn't particularly like.

She also brought children into the marriage, so he had stepbrothers and stepsisters on that side as well. He really distanced himself from all of them and everybody else from his childhood. We didn't have any photos of his family around the house. I got the sense that being around them made him sad, but he never talked about it, and I never asked. I had two sets of grandparents on my father's side alone, and there were so many half- and stepsiblings that when I'd see them at a rare Drain family event, I didn't even know how anyone was related to whom, if they were steps, or halves, or in-laws.

My father didn't make much of an effort to stay in touch with any of them.

Because he didn't care for his stepmother, he took me to visit his real dad, whom I called Pop, only on occasion. Pop died of a stroke when I was nine or ten and we were living in Kansas. Dad had to fly back to Florida for the funeral. When he returned, he was very upset. I was surprised by this, because they had never seemed close. Typical of my father, he didn't describe any of his feelings of sadness. But he had a way of acting arrogantly and as though things were okay to mask his vulnerabilities.

All of his family relationships seemed really dysfunctional. Dad himself told me his mother hadn't cared when he dropped out of high school at his first opportunity, which he had done not because he wasn't smart but because he had a problem with rules and authority figures. She also paid little attention to his bad behavior, marijuana smoking, or drinking. Most teens would have been delighted to do as they pleased, but my dad was really hurt that his mother didn't even seem to notice. She told him to pursue whatever he wanted; it was fine with her. I think what he really would have liked was for her to take an interest in him and offer him guidance, but that never happened.

To me, Grandma Joy didn't seem self-absorbed. She was really fun and a big personality. She and Popper lived in West Palm Beach, and Dad and I would drive the four hours from the Gulf Coast to visit them. Their house was warm and welcoming with a big, flowery jungle of a backyard, a kids' swing set, a hot tub, and a basketball court. We didn't visit that often, and when we did, it wasn't for a religious holiday. Grandma Joy was not a religious person.

She was Presbyterian in name only, because she never went to church. She was the kind of person who celebrated Christmas not for Jesus, just for Santa.

In contrast to my father's family, my mother's parents, Frank and Madelyn Stout, were Catholic and quite devout. Their home was ornamented with crucifixes, pictures of Jesus, and statues of the Virgin Mary. At Christmastime, they built a nativity scene on their front lawn. They also hosted all the holidays at their house, which were great fun.

Mom had been born in October 1965, and she grew up in Tampa as the youngest of Frank and Madelyn's five children. The oldest was Lisa, followed by Sam, Amy, Stacy, and Mom. My aunt Lisa had a very sad story.

She had gotten involved in drugs at a very young age and led a very promiscuous lifestyle. By the time she was halfway through her twenties, she already had two children with different men. She was a total hippie, always on the road. We never knew if she was in Florida, Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico. Being the youngest, and with my grandmother always preoccupied with Lisa and all her problems, my mother didn't get much of her parents'

time or attention. I think my mother thought of herself as the lost child, although she was close to her sister Stacy, who was four years her senior.

I loved being with my grandparents, but there was a heavy, unspoken undertone of friction between my father and them. I assumed it was because they had wanted Mom to marry a Catholic, and Dad didn't believe in God. In my earliest memories, Dad always described himself as an atheist, before I even knew what the word meant. He loudly made fun of organized religion, God, and the fact that my mother's family attended church, not keeping his disdain to himself. Mom's parents didn't like him any more than he liked them. They thought he was pushy and controlling, and that he'd lead her away from her faith. They also felt he had nothing going for him. According to my mother's family, my father was a bit of a wild child in those days and very defiant. He smoked cigarettes and supposedly smoked marijuana. He did have a few redeeming qualities. He always had some kind of part-time work, and he loved tinkering with cars and motorcycles, even rebuilding an old Camaro, but he was still a high school dropout, an on-again, off-again drug user, a bigmouth, and a control freak.

Despite his shortcomings, my mother was swept up by him, seeing him as a smart, charismatic, motorcycle-riding rebel. He was tall and handsome, with red hair, blue eyes, and a baby face. She liked that he had opinions he was willing to go out on a limb for--and she was a meek follower type, so they balanced each other out. And she did almost everything he told her, except with regard to church. Despite his antireligious stance, Mom continued to go to Catholic Mass on holidays and on an occasional Sunday, far less often than the mandatory weekly Mass of her youth, but still enough to demonstrate her faith.

My parents had been married for a little more than two years when I was born on New Year's Eve, December 31, 1985. They were both only twenty years old at the time. My father still wanted to do cool, young things, which he could do in the daytime because he was a night shift manager for a trucking company. My mother was going to school to be a dental hygienist when I was born. My father had wanted to let her go to vocational school first, so when she finished she could get a job and he could go back to school. While she worked in a dental office and supported our family, he earned his GED and then went for an undergraduate degree at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

My mother's parents still lived in the same house where she had been raised, and while we lived in Florida our house was in the same neighborhood, so I would see them all the time. Since my mother had so many siblings, there were always plenty of cousins around in my early life, and I always had someone to play with. I didn't let the simmering feelings between my dad and my grandparents affect my relationship with them.

Once we were in Kansas, my life was very lonely without my grandparents and cousins around the corner. I loved the activities I did with Dad, but I still missed my relatives. Less than a year after we'd been there, we got the devastating news that Taylor had been diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer called Wilms' tumor. She had to have one of her kidneys removed, and then spent a whole year living in the hospital. For my sake, my parents made sure to stay optimistic and tried to make visiting her in the hospital fun for me. I don't remember being sad that often, almost certainly because of the way Mom and Dad handled it.

When Taylor was well enough, doctors put a catheter in her belly so that my parents could administer her chemotherapy treatments at home--a task they sometimes let me help with. She had to have three years of chemo, as well as weekly CAT scans to see if the tumor was shrinking. She was always very tired. She didn't have any hair until she was three or four years old.

Finally, when her treatments stopped, she grew her first mop of dirty blonde hair.

I was really happy that Taylor was finally home from the hospital, and that I could see her every day. She had gotten a whole bunch of toys for her first birthday that she had never been able to play with. I had given her a corn-popper push toy that she could play with outside, and I was delighted when she took such a liking to it that she ran to it first thing every morning. And for our first snow (a big novelty for us, being from southern Florida), we stayed outside for hours building snowmen and making snow angels until Mom called us in. On warmer days, she loved having me push her on the swing in our backyard.

Slowly, Taylor got stronger and stronger. My parents bought a trampoline for the backyard, and I taught my sister how to jump on it, although we had to be mindful not to dislodge the catheter, which was taped safely to her stomach. I admired Taylor's bravery. Even though she was often worn out and weak, she had such a happy disposition and was always smiling. Mom, Dad, and I had all banded together to help her get better, and we all rejoiced together when the doctors let us know her prognosis was excellent for a full remission and a long life.