CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. Teach me thy way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain path, because of mine enemies. Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty.
—Psalm 27:10–12
My last morning in the hotel, I knew I had to take action because there was nobody coming to my rescue. The night my father dropped me off, he had given me the number for an apartment complex where Josh Phelps had stayed when he had first gotten out. It was on the bad side of town, but when the manager told me there were furnished units available for $500 a month, payable on a month-to-month basis, I drove straight there. That Monday, I moved my few suitcases and bags containing everything I owned into my new home in about ten minutes.
It wasn’t much of an apartment, but I needed one with furniture, since I didn’t have any and didn’t really know how to go about buying it. The place was like a small motel suite, about five hundred square feet. There was a half kitchen on one side; a regular sofa, a chair, and a television in the living room; a sparsely furnished bedroom; and a small bathroom with a tub. I bought only a microwave and a few dishes, pots, and linens, not wanting to accumulate much stuff. Even though I was twenty-one and a legal adult, I had been controlled for so long that I had no idea how to live independently and without support. Something as simple as grocery shopping for myself was overwhelming. After the years I’d been told exactly what items to buy, what route to take to the store, and how long the round-trip journey should take me, I found myself missing the comfort of rigid rules and systems.
One day, my mother called me out of the blue and asked me to come over so she could give me the title to my car and my birth certificate, remove my name from her credit cards and her name from mine, separate our bank accounts, and cut off my cell phone, which was still tied to hers.
When I got to the house my brother ran to me, threw his arms around me, and said, “Sissy, where have you been? I’ve missed you.” My baby sister was already mocking me. “You don’t live here anymore,” she told me, and turned to my mother. “Isn’t that true?” My mother looked at me coldly. “Lauren, don’t confuse the children,” she said without any emotion at all.
Not long after my banishment, I reached out to Scott, the only person who I knew would still talk to me. A couple of weeks later, he offered to fly to Topeka to give me moral support. It was a surprise, but I was so nervous, alone, and desperate that I welcomed his company. This was going to be the first time I had ever met him in person. I drove to the airport and hid in the crowd by the gate, not wanting him to see me first. I knew what he looked like in his picture, but that didn’t mean he didn’t look scary or creepy in the flesh. If he looked suspect, I could leave him there, because I didn’t want to end up dead. I recognized him right away when he stepped into the arrival area. He was tall and well-built, with blond hair and a beard. He looked pretty harmless, so I approached him to say hi. It felt really awkward. We smiled at each other, but didn’t touch. After a bit of small talk about his flight, we sat down to wait for his luggage. I felt really weird driving this guy straight to my house. He wasn’t aggressive, and in no time we were comfortable and enjoying each other’s company.
Unfortunately, my mother found out about the visit, although I didn’t know it. She had checked my bank statement in the process of separating our accounts and saw that I had used my credit card to purchase a round-trip plane ticket from Connecticut to Topeka.
While Scott was here, I got a call from my parents asking me to come pick up my stuff. I was really paranoid about going by myself, not knowing how it was going to go down, so I reluctantly allowed Scott to come with me, but only after he promised to stay in the car. I also chose a time to come when I knew my father would be at work, preferring to do business with my mother.
I thought it was odd that she and Taylor had been dragging everything that they thought was mine onto the driveway, eliminating my need to enter the house. I tried to think they were just being helpful. A dresser, a couple of lamps, two more duffel bags, a plastic wastebasket filled with toiletries—shampoo, brushes and combs, headbands, and other things—a hamper, a little three-shelf bookcase, my bike, and my desk chair sat in about two inches of slush, with more by the front door ready to come outside. Just then, to my horror, my father arrived in his truck, traveling so fast I thought he was going to run over all my things. He slammed the truck to a stop, went into the house, and then came back out foaming in fury.
Immediately, he started calling me every curse word in existence and told me what hell had in store for me. By what he was screaming, I realized my mother must have seen Scott in the car and called my father about it. “I can’t believe you’d pick this piece of shit over me,” he raged. As his anger escalated and he began hurling my things from the front door to the lawn, Scott rolled down the car window and started cursing at my father and told him not to say such horrible things to me. “She doesn’t deserve a dad like you,” he said. Unfortunately, his attempt to defend me only escalated the situation, and I was furious that he was getting involved. Dad was screaming, “You can have her!” Mom and Taylor were opening and closing the front door as they dumped my stuff outside, and I was yelling at Scott and Dad to shut up, feeling sick to my stomach at the madness. Pretty soon, every Phelps on the block was in their yard or at the road watching, with their arms crossed and their faces sneering at me in disgust. I could see Margie, Becky, Shirley, and a few of her eleven kids, and Tim with some of his nine, although I didn’t see Jael or Megan in the assembly. I managed to throw everything into my trunk and backseat and got out of there in about eight minutes flat, numb and exhausted. The only thing I remember about the trip back to the apartment was that Scott drove.
After that horror show, I felt totally exhausted and overwhelmed. I hadn’t wanted it to go like that, with my family hating me more than ever. Now that I had all my paperwork, I found the bill with a plane ticket charged on it that my mother had discovered, and I realized she had known that someone from Connecticut was in Kansas before I had arrived at the house.
“It’s over,” she said when I called her to apologize. “You can never come back. I can see how lost you are. You flew someone out here? I don’t love you anymore.” I thought God must have been behind her finding the one bill that had something damaging enough to make her stop loving me.
Scott stayed with me in Topeka for two weeks before going back to Connecticut, and then we stayed in touch via Instant Messenger. After he left, I began going through my paperwork, but I had no idea how to handle my personal affairs. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do with my car title, nor had I ever been to the DMV to do anything besides get my State of Kansas driver’s license. My mother shut off my cell service before I had a chance to get a new number. A couple of days later, I forgot what day of the week it was, failed to show up at work, and got in huge trouble when no one could contact me to find out what was going on. I knew that if I didn’t get my life together, I would end up homeless.
I might have been delusional, but even though the whole church knew I had brought a boy with me to my parents’ house, I truly thought my banishment would last for only a month or so. One time, when I had a day off from work, I visited my little brother at his school. I watched him at recess, afraid to approach him, because I thought my parents would press charges if I tried.
I called Mom several times, even though I wasn’t supposed to. The conversations were short, and each ended without any hope of forgiveness or reconciliation. In January 2008, she called to let me know that she and my father were claiming me as a dependent on their income taxes, so I had better write that I was a dependent when I filed mine. That was as personal as our communication got. I was still in shock and denial about how my life had changed at the flip of a switch. My new freedom felt nothing like an emancipation: I had lost my identity, my parents, my beloved sister
Taylor, my sweet babies Boaz and Faith, my friends, God, and my salvation. Every source of happiness I had had was gone.
For six months, all I did was go to work, go home to my tiny apartment, eat TV dinners, go to bed, and go to work again. I got a flea-covered cat named Fozzy free of charge from the animal shelter near my apartment, to keep me company. I had numerous panic attacks, thinking I was dying and God was sending me to hell sooner rather than later. One afternoon, I was driving home from the supermarket when I felt such a pain in my chest that I thought God was actually killing me in that moment. Barely able to breathe, I pulled my car over to the shoulder and sat there for the longest time, consumed with panic. My time had come, and God was sending me to hell. I was so terrified, I called my mother from my cell phone, not even worrying that it was against the rules. “Is this an emergency?” she asked me when she picked up, and I started crying. I told her I was possibly in the midst of a heart attack, and she talked me down, suggesting that it might be a panic attack. “Mom, what do I do? What do I do?” I begged her. She replied that when I was settled enough to drive, I should go home and pray.
Every day, I was anxious and exhausted. Sometimes, I’d try to go out with a few of my friends from work, but I couldn’t relax and would leave shortly after I got there. I didn’t like being lonely, sitting home for months on end eating microwave dinners and feeling depressed. I couldn’t even entertain the idea of going to a therapist, despite the suggestion from my sympathetic boss that I was anxious and depressed. I thought therapy was for weaklings, a subhuman and demeaning process for dealing with pain. There was no way a therapist could understand me or my religion. No person who hadn’t been a member of the church was capable of empathizing with my profound sense of betrayal. I had spent the past seven years in faithful obedience and had picketed every chance I could, and they had thrown me to the dogs.
I worked twelve hours a day, changing colostomy bags and volunteering for any other tasks that would keep me busy at the hospital. My coworkers knew the basics of what was going on, but I had no one there I used as a confidante. I had no home phone number, but I didn’t have anyone calling, either. I hid my depression as best I could by either being home sleeping or working overtime.
I was careful to keep a close watch on my schedule so as to overlap with Jael as little as possible. Jael was dreadful to me. If I ran into her at work, she’d say anything she could to taunt me and make me understand how unwanted I was. She’d make sure to mention some exciting picket the church had been on or reference a lovely encounter with my babies Boaz and Faith. I had been by her side for seven years straight: high school, college, nursing school, church, pickets, and work. Now, she was so arrogant and cruel, I hardly recognized my former best friend. She complained to our manager that I was hard to work with, and she requested that I be transferred to a different floor. Instead, our boss replied, “Jael, if you cannot handle working with Lauren, then you are free to leave or transfer, but she does an excellent job here.” After that, we stayed on the same unit.
Once, in the hallway of the hospital, Jael called my parents from her cell phone within earshot of me. “Hi, Luci,” I heard her say. “I hope I can come over for dinner and see Faith and Bo soon.” I reacted by calling my mother as soon as Jael gave me her “so there” look of satisfaction. I pleaded to come home for one night just for dinner, and Mom said yes. Timing my call to make sure Jael overheard turned out to be a rash mistake. Jael immediately called my father, who called me. “Don’t you dare come over here,” he warned me. “You are trying to get us in trouble with the church by coming over. How dare you put Jael in this awkward position!”
On top of that, Taylor worked at the Dairy Queen right across the street from my apartment complex. For the first couple of months, I thought about dropping in on her there, but I was too anxious about it to actually do it. After all, she was working, and I might mess up her composure by making her feel awkward and divided. I knew the church rules—by talking to someone evil, you became evil—so I kept her best interests in mind and stayed away. A couple of times, though, I ate at the Dairy Queen when I knew she wouldn’t be working. Shirley called me up about that and left a message on my voice mail. “You are not allowed to do Dairy Queen. That’s the kids’ place of employment—stay away.” My self-esteem was so low that I obeyed. I hoped Taylor would visit me one day, but I was too nervous to call her and put her in the middle. We had been so close. Five minutes was all I wanted. But I would have hated myself more than I already did if I got her in trouble.
One time, I saw my father in the St. Francis cafeteria and realized that my mother was in the hospital as a patient. I figured it was probably something related to her recurring back problems. My father would never have come to my workplace unless there was a medical reason. I did a double take when I saw him. He looked me straight in the eye, then turned around and walked away. He wasn’t even courteous enough to acknowledge me. I was a nurse, a person, and his daughter. He looked at me with an expression that let me know that I was not even human in his eyes. It was the scariest feeling I ever had. I suddenly thought that I had no importance, that I was nothing but a ghost. I was not a source of comfort to him whatsoever. That I was his daughter and a Christian—none of that mattered.
There was no way I could have gone to see my mother in her hospital room. For one thing, I would be violating HIPAA privacy laws if I did, and I could be disciplined or fired. Unless someone summoned me and called me in, I couldn’t make the decision to visit because I was technically not family anymore. Besides that, since I was no longer a member of the WBC, I wasn’t allowed to visit one of God’s people. To call on one of our own who was laid up in the hospital was an act of charity and godliness, and I no longer had the right to visit my own mother. I wasn’t about to do anything that violated the law or the church, so I stayed away.
However upsetting it was, this encounter in the hospital was actually a major breakthrough for me. It made me realize just how cut off I was. Someone in my family could be dead, and I would never know. At that moment, I realized that I had to carry forward with that in mind.
I ran into other people from the congregation as well. Once, I ran into Liz Phelps and her baby in the Walmart closest to the block. She looked at me like I was demonic and passed me without saying a word. I took to shopping at the Walmart in the more dangerous part of town after that to avoid those kinds of encounters. I didn’t care if it was risky; I really didn’t care if I lived or died. I ran into Abigail Phelps a couple of times at the gym. I didn’t even know we both went to the same YMCA until I heard someone laughing and looked up. It was Abigail, laughing disdainfully and pointing at me. “Oh, my God, it’s the whore,” she said.
Despite these little emotional setbacks, my spirituality was still a huge priority for me. Without the church, the void where my faith had been was almost unbearable. What did I believe? Had I completely lost my intelligence for seven years? I was so scared of having been lied to or perverted or having lost all my knowledge that I had to hold on to the possibility that the church would invite me back. I didn’t want to mess too much with what I had been taught. Making interpretations and judgments on my own was overwhelming.
My life was in a downward spiral. I was in total confusion and turmoil, and I had a god who wanted me dead. I sensed that God was lying in wait ready to kill me. The only reason He hadn’t yet was that He liked watching my terror. I had always trusted that the people around me loved and cared enough about me to tell me the truth. Their judgments about me had given me my moral direction, and their picketing had structured my life, too. I hadn’t rejoiced in being cast out in any way. It had no freedom in it, only terror. Now that my people were gone, I still believed in the same angry God I had described to anyone who had seen me with a sign and shaken a fist at me. But now, those warnings were against myself. “Prepare to Meet thy God” underscored my every move.
It was so scary, but it was real. I had to second-guess every move I
made. I’d been telling people for seven years that these horrible things were going to happen to them, and they hadn’t believed me. My predicament was that I did believe that the pain, death, and eternal, hottest part of hell were indeed my immediate destiny. Now that I wasn’t a chosen one, I couldn’t really think for a minute I was going anywhere else.
Scott and I continued our relationship. I really liked his support and had fleeting feelings I was falling in love with him. I had no one else to talk to, so I could vent and release with him. He came to Topeka in early spring for another three or four weeks, even deferring a semester in college to stay with me. He said he would move to Kansas if I wanted him to, but I was in no position to be so committed. I was working on navigating the world on my own.
My mother usually didn’t take my calls, but I kept trying. Whenever she did pick up, I’d beg her to give me a time frame for a second chance. Chris Davis had been invited back after a year. “Is it six months? Is it a year?” I pleaded. She told me the pastor wasn’t saying anything, and she didn’t add any encouragement that things might turn in my favor. Only once did she briefly ask me about my life. “Are you still with that boy?” I said I was. “That’s what I thought. I knew you wouldn’t stop,” she said before hanging up the phone.
On March 14, 2008, I called my father to wish him a happy birthday. He picked up while he was driving and put me on speakerphone. I could hear other people in the car. He was so rude I couldn’t even figure out why he’d bothered to answer when he saw my number on his caller ID. I guess he just needed to sink his teeth into me one more time. “I don’t know why you’re calling me,” he said. “I enjoyed my time with you, but we are done now. I don’t really know what else we have to say.” He was devoid of any emotion. I was crying, and all he said was, “Well, good-bye.” I thought God was reminding me just how much I wasn’t missed.
Banished : Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (9781455518470) Page 25
