Banished : Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (9781455518470)

by Drain, Lauren; Pulitzer, Lisa (CON)

  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.

  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 t
here 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.