Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (3 page)

Throughout Taylor's illness, Dad had been working on his master's.

Shuttling back and forth between Olathe and Lawrence was hard, so as soon as Taylor was better, we moved to a house closer to campus. We hadn't lived there long when a missionary-type preacher came to the door proselytizing. Dad invited him in, wanting to challenge him to an intellectual debate he felt sure he would win.

My father loved arguing with people. He was pompous and wanted to discredit the visitor with reason and logic. The preacher gave him answers that he hadn't expected, though, ones that were intriguing and intelligent. It wasn't long before he and Dad began meeting once or twice a week in our dining room to study the Bible together. My mother was wary of the relationship at first, but she trusted my father to know what he was getting into. I thought it was weird, because my father didn't really like zealots, but I guessed that maybe it had to do with Taylor's brush with death, and that Dad was searching for the meaning of life or the promise of ultimate salvation.

Throughout all this, though, Dad remained adamant that his interest was intellectual, not theological or spiritual. My father still had an extreme opposition to going to any church, saying nobody learned anything there, but he was interested in studying privately, one-on-one, so he could ask questions and get answers.

I noticed we made a lot of changes that year. Mom started studying the Bible again, too. She really loved that Dad was including religion in his life in a serious way for the first time. Of course, everything Dad did was always obsessive and compulsive-- he put 100 percent into anything he took on. In no time, he had us dressing according to what he had learned in his readings. He got rid of all his hats at a garage sale; according to Corinthians, every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, so hats and caps had to go. Mom sewed a bunch of long skirts for herself, because modesty was part of being submissive to God and your husband. She didn't force Taylor and me to change our style of dress, but I wanted to, because Mom was doing it and I liked to be just like her. I swapped my short skirts for new ones Mom sewed for me that fell below the knee.

Dad started inviting all kinds of weird people to have meals with us. He explained that they were less fortunate than us, and that charity was our obligation as Christians. We even opened our home to university-affiliated people who couldn't afford to live on campus. Taylor moved into my room so there would be a vacant room for the boarders who usually stayed with us for a month or two at a stretch. I was happy to have her as a roommate. After the year she had spent in the hospital, I loved having her close to me. She slept on a little toddler bed right next to mine. We'd stay up talking until one of us fell asleep. On some nights, I'd even get out of my bed and slide in next to her.

That fall, one woman who looked Middle Eastern and her three-month-old baby moved into Taylor's room. She was one of Dad's students and had been living in an apartment on campus until she couldn't afford it anymore.

From the state of her clothes, she seemed to be very poor. She always wore long dresses and kept her head covered with a scarf. The baby's father didn't appear to be in her life. She was soft-spoken, humble, and thankful to be living with us. She was very nice and babysat for Taylor and me a couple of times.

We skipped Halloween that year--it was a pagan celebration, and my father said it honored the Devil. We didn't plan to celebrate Christmas, either, much to my unspoken disappointment. My father told us that December 25 was not the true date when Christ was born, and even if it had been, the Bible did not say it was a cause for celebration. My father also thought that Christmas was too commercialized, and he didn't want to celebrate it in that fashion.

By mid-December, though, almost a year into their relationship, Dad and his mentor had a falling-out. Dad later related the conversation to me. It had something to do with the six millennia following God's creation of Adam and Eve. He told me that the preacher said that if you studied the Bible correctly, believed in God, and did the right things, you would live on earth forever.

The preacher said that God's chosen people never die a physical death.

Moses and Elijah were still on earth and had been for almost six thousand years. I didn't know what that meant. What would you look like if you were six thousand years old? I agreed with Dad that it was absurd.

We never saw the missionary preacher again, and we stopped taking in free boarders. We celebrated Christmas after all, which made me very happy.

After that, Mom and Dad tried studying the Bible on their own, but Mom also went back to wearing less conservative clothes and attending a Catholic Mass from time to time. She'd look in the newspaper to see where a service was and then go to listen, sometimes bringing me. All I knew about church was that it was early in the morning on Sunday, you wore a dress, and you listened to someone talk on and on. I liked the pageantry, but even more I loved having my mother all to myself.

The next year, my father moved away from religion, saying that it tended to go to extremes. He said the preacher's theory that some people lived on the earth forever was a perfect example. Instead of the faithful Bible student he'd been, he embraced his hippie rocker side and became the coolest dad in the world. He never missed a single one of my peewee softball games, and he was always on the sidelines cheering me on. Everybody liked him. He was so sociable and still in his twenties then; he was like a big kid. All of my friends adored him, too.

Dad filled the void left by the preacher's departure with a lot of wilder friends.

He even started his own band called Boneyard. There always seemed to be a ton of people in the house drinking, smoking, and playing instruments in the basement. My mother had a few acquaintances from work, but they weren't really the kind of friends that came into their social life; those came from Dad. Mom would chat with them, but she really wasn't into the same kind of scene that Dad was. For one, she didn't like drinking. She might have a wine cooler here and there, but that was it. While Dad was playing rock and roll in the basement, Mom preferred being with Taylor and me in the backyard, watching us play on the trampoline, or making us treats in the kitchen. The one thing my parents liked to do together was play softball.

They were on a coed University of Kansas club team, the Yahoos. Mom played catcher, second base, or shortstop, and Dad was either a pitcher or a catcher. Taylor and I would wear the green team colors and cheer them on from the bleachers.

Just as in our first weeks in Kansas, whenever I showed an interest in any of Dad's passions, he would be right there to help me foster it. When he saw that I liked softball, he started taking me to the batting cages at the university's sports complex to practice our swings. When I was eleven and took up guitar, he helped me start my first-ever all-girl band. The band was in the elementary school talent show, and I was the guitarist and lead singer.

The performance was the great highlight of my seventh grade--in fact, of that whole stint in Kansas.

By the time Taylor was healthy, Mom liked living in Kansas, but I could tell she still missed her family. We were only in Lawrence a short time when we learned that her sister Lisa's lifeless body had been found on a beach in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Police believed she had been stabbed during some kind of drug deal gone wrong. Mom flew home to Tampa for the funeral. She was still upset when she came back a few days later, but with Lisa living a dangerous lifestyle there wasn't much shock and surprise that she had died young.

Dad took to life in Kansas a lot easier than Mom had. He was a perpetual student. I don't know if he had a clue what he wanted to do, but he told me he was seeking some type of truth. He took some philosophy, some civilization, and some religion courses--all of the subjects he chose had a spiritual or metaphysical bent. He changed his major so many times it took him seven years to graduate. KU paid for only two years of graduate school, so his ongoing searching for a major was a real financial burden on our family. Mom was still working hard, but what was supposed to be two years and a free ride had turned into seven years with huge student loans.

The debt caused a lot of arguments about money. Not only were the student loans growing, but Mom felt that Dad wasn't being fiscally responsible in everyday life, either. Whenever they had money, he'd want to upgrade his camera equipment rather than pay down the debt. My mother, meanwhile, wanted to make sure we weren't getting in over our heads. She was a very easygoing person and eager to please, but sometimes at night, I'd hear her fighting with my father, complaining about his frivolous money habits and his long hours away from the house, specifically the amount of time he was spending with some of his female students. "You're away too much," she would protest. "What is going on with these girls?" He would insist they were all just "friends."

One of Dad's undergraduate students particularly bothered my mother. She was supposedly in business with him, buying fixer-uppers and paying Dad to help with the renovations. My mother was uncomfortable with that arrangement, insisting it was inappropriate for a student to hire her professor.

But it went further than that. My mother sensed that there was more to the relationship, but he denied it. Still, Mom wasn't convinced.

I could feel the tension around the house when my mother was in a confrontational mood. Short of leaving Dad, however, which he knew she would never do, my mother didn't have a lot of options. So she never took the arguments beyond the point of her suspicions, and Dad had no reason to take her seriously and change. Even in Florida, there had been hints that he had been unfaithful, but he knew she would never want to break up the family.

At long last, Dad graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in film in 1997. Mom had no objection when he announced that summer that he wanted to go back to Tampa to start a film production company. I was twelve and Taylor was seven when we started packing up everything we were taking for the move. My best friend, a Pakistani girl named Anna, accepted the invitation to fly with us and to stay in Tampa for a week, which meant any sadness I had about leaving Kansas was delayed. Taylor, as usual, went with the flow. She was upset when she said good-bye to her best friend, Anna's little sister Parendi, but she was too young to understand we weren't coming back.

Trying to emulate Taylor's optimistic disposition, I suppressed my deep anxiety about starting over and having to enter middle school with no friends.

Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of
our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by
nature the children of wrath, even as others.

--Ephesians 2:3

Mom and Dad found us a house to rent in Bradenton, about twenty miles south of Tampa. It was a three-bedroom ranch in a gated community filled with families. Mom was in great spirits, thrilled to be back near her own family. She was back in a routine with her sister Stacy in no time, and it didn't take her long to find another job as a dental hygienist at an office not far from our house. Taylor and I spent the two weeks before school started riding our bikes around the neighborhood in search of new friends.

My father used his master's degree to get a job at the Home Shopping Network (HSN). He was really excited about his position as a creative director with a small staff under him. Even though he wouldn't be behind the camera, he was in the production department and learning a lot. When he'd take me to the office, I noticed everybody around him wanted to hear his ideas. If he had a concept for a song or a commercial, his coworkers always listened enthusiastically. He had a way about him that was so charismatic and magnetic that people were immediately drawn to him.

I loved being with my father. Now that we were back in Florida and he was happily employed in a career he loved, our time together was more fun than ever. He liked to take me to the HSN studio and impress me with all the production equipment. But I didn't care where we were or what we were doing--I was just content to be in his company.

His creative talents, combined with his business savvy, resulted in hugely successful projects for HSN. Taylor and I were even cast in a commercial he was producing for Ty, the maker of Beanie Babies. We were supposed to play with the stuffed animals and recite a line or two. I had never acted before, but thought I would be really good at it. I also wanted to make my father proud of me, but I kept screwing up my lines, and Dad grew increasingly annoyed. In front of everybody, he pointed out that I was the oldest kid in the commercial. He said that the younger kids, even Taylor, were getting their parts right, so why couldn't I? He didn't seem to realize how embarrassed I was to be singled out. Despite my struggle with the lines, the commercial was a big success, which brought him recognition and assignments to produce other important segments for jewelry and cooking shows.

My own transition back to Florida was not quite so easy. I entered the eighth grade without any friends. I tried to settle into a new version of my old life in Bradenton, but the friends I had known in my childhood weren't that interested in reconnecting with me. I stayed in touch with my friend Anna via e-mail, and over the next couple of years, she flew from Kansas to stay with me during winter vacations. One December break, she effectively ended our friendship when she developed a crush on my cousin and wanted to spend more time with him than me.

I still played the guitar, and Dad was keeping my interest alive by taking me with him to see two of his favorite artists, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Lenny Kravitz, when they played in the Tampa area. I wanted to perform in the school talent show, but I wasn't in a band, and I didn't have the confidence to do a solo act. My father came up with a solution--he volunteered to play bass, and my cousin Brennen offered to be the drummer.