by the elders, the petty backbiting among church members, the merciless shunning of my mother. He pretended their cruel treatment of her—removing my mother from the work she had done for decades as a way of shaming and isolating her—wasn’t punishment but kindness. “We lifted her burden,” he said. It was an especially embittering fabrication because it was exactly what they should have done—what I’d wished so often that they had done.
And then, amid the deluge of words, this paragraph:
Shirley Phelps-Roper, the mother of the sisters, is doing OK in the wake of her daughters leaving the church, Drain said. On Wednesday, she was at a local facility welcoming the birth that morning of a grandson, Jason Brent.
Jason Brent. Sam’s son. A nephew I might never know.
Sitting on the green couch by the inn’s living room window, I watched a whitetail deer cross Lincoln Avenue and disappear around the side of the house. My efforts at remaining calm were proving unsuccessful, and I sobbed tears of desperation—not because outsiders might believe Steve’s dissembling, but because church members would. Just as I had done with Nate and Josh and Libby, they would accept these narratives about Grace and me. We would be painted as evil, and they would be disposed to listen. I had tried to preempt this process back at home, to thwart it in as many ways as I could, even turning my final tweet as a Westboro member into a message to my sister Bekah. An angry person on Twitter had told her that “nobody loves you,” and she had retorted, “That’s not true! MeganPhelps loves me.;)” My response remained there for months, and I had refused to post anything else afterward. It was a reference to a line from a movie we had watched together, delivered forcefully by Jack Nicholson—a standing reminder to her in my absence.
“You’re goddamn right I do!”—A Few Good Men
They had to do it, though. Demonizing Grace and me was the only way to protect their image of Westboro as not just benign but wholly good. They couldn’t allow themselves to truly contemplate the idea that Westboro might be wrong about the ideals to which they had dedicated their lives. They needed to believe in the righteousness of their cause just as much as we needed them to see its destructiveness.
What were they telling my siblings right now? That I had traded them in because I wanted the approval and love and attention of outsiders—that I wanted to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, because I loved the world more. Had I chosen the love of the world over the love of my family? My mind rebelled at the thought, at the crippling guilt. I would never have willingly made such an exchange. This had never been a choice between strangers and family, between the world’s love and its hatred. It wasn’t the desire for an easy life that led me to leave. Losing them was the price of honesty. A shredded heart for a quiet conscience.
* * *
There was silence on the other end of the line for a beat.
“What?”
I sat down at the kitchen table at the inn, watching Luna stalk across the hardwood floor. She was one of the Floyds’ two black cats, a stray they’d taken in not long before Grace and I arrived. Animals made me anxious, because we’d never had pets in our home—“We had brothers and allergies, instead,” I always joked—but Luna was beautiful, her fur thick and lustrous, her eyes a piercing yellow. She suddenly turned and scampered up the stairs, spooked, and I switched my phone to the other ear. “Yeah,” I said. “You’ve definitely got part of the blame for my leaving.”
It had been a few days since Jeff and I had published our posts online, and I was catching up with another of my new friends and counselors. David Abitbol was an Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem, and the two of us were discussing a question that had been on my mind frequently in the months since it had first occurred to me to leave the church: How had this happened? How had my perspective changed so much in such a short amount of time, from an obedient follower who instinctively suppressed doubts to a malcontent who just couldn’t leave well enough alone? I had spent endless hours racking my brain for clues, tracking the changes in my perspective over time, and I found myself returning again and again to