even to moderate their positions, maybe we could help save other families some of this added pain.
Scrolling through my family’s tweets that morning, though, I understood that Twitter was a double-edged sword. #WhereIsMeganPhelpsRoper was the hashtag, speculation by Westboro detractors who noted my unusual absence from the platform. Twitter connected one especially hard-core critic with a Topekan, who was dispatched to drive by my home in search of my car, and by church protests to see if I could be spotted on the picket line. I panicked reading their exchanges and their taunts to my mother, bile continuing to rise in my throat as I found a Facebook message from a Topeka reporter—cleverly worded such that if I didn’t provide a response, she could assume that I had left Westboro.
I pounced on Grace the moment she woke up, trying not to let myself become overwhelmed by my panic as I read the messages aloud. It felt like being hunted. Forced to publicly reckon with a past I was still trying to understand, a present I was wholly unprepared to navigate, and a future that remained a terrifying abyss. Clearly, we were going to have to say something—but what?
Grace led the way out of the attic and down the hidden stairway to the kitchen, where we found Dustin and Laura eating breakfast. They would help us figure this out.
“Why do we owe anyone an explanation for anything? Why do they get to care?!” Grace exploded in the middle of the discussion, angry at our having been put in this position. I couldn’t blame her, exactly, but the question felt shortsighted to me.
“The way we did things at home…” I started. “We put everything out there. We lived our whole lives in front of cameras and reporters. We spent our days preaching a message that hurt so many people, and all of that is public—so public—and we spent years working hard to make it that way. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all those interviews and news articles … all those things are still out there. Maybe we don’t ‘owe’ people anything … but I feel like we do.”
“And right now,” Dustin pointed out, “that’s who you guys are to the world. You are ‘God Hates Fags.’ If you don’t think that’s true anymore, you’ll want to do something to change that.”
Laura looked pensive and nodded. “I understand how you feel, Grace. I think I’d feel the same way in your position … but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Okay,” I said, after a tense silence. “I’ll try to write something, and we can look at it together later.”
I picked up my phone and wandered out to the living room, tucking myself into the green couch by the big window and staring, unseeing, at the pine forests up the hill.
Where would I even begin? Should I try to explain why I had done and said the things I had while I was at Westboro? Should I unequivocally apologize for everything? What exactly did I feel sorry for?
When I saw Laura shuffling across the hardwood floor in her stocking feet, I turned sideways, pushing myself up to sit on the arm of the sofa while she took the seat next to me. It hadn’t taken long for Grace and me to invite her into our circle of shoulder massages and head scratches, and I was comforted by the remnants of our happy life back home. Laura sat quietly as my mind leafed through the pages of my memory, searching, but I wasn’t sure what for. I narrated the scenes to her aloud. Those sweltering early days at Gage Park, surrounded by loved ones in fanny packs, my tiny fists wrapped around the edges of a sign I couldn’t read. How upset I’d been at age twelve after Matthew Shepard’s death, not because of his murder, but because it wasn’t my turn to travel to picket his funeral. I remembered the day Josh left—I’d been eighteen for a few months at that point, so I could have left the church then. Technically, I’d had that choice.
“I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” Laura said.
“I guess I’m looking for a line,” I told her. “Am I responsible for what I did at Westboro after I turned eighteen—and my parents, everything before?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “But turning eighteen didn’t magically wipe out all the years before it. I might have had the legal choice to leave, but how could I possibly have done it?