cherished every opportunity to do so. Plus, it was fun!
All Westboro members had to be prepared to engage reporters and passersby on the picket line, but with the forwarding of the calls, my mother became the church’s de facto spokesperson. That she worked from home gave her the flexibility to field calls during the workday when almost no one else was consistently and readily available, and her willingness to take on that job meant that Westboro was in the news more than ever before. One-sided conversations with members of the media would ring through our house at all hours of the day and night, our mother celebrating the hundreds of thousands of fatalities in the 2004 tsunami—the Swedish ones in particular—and cataloguing for an Australian radio station all the reasons that Heath Ledger deserved eternal torment. More than one host referred to my mother’s sassy, funny, take-no-prisoners attitude as “radio gold.” Margie was the go-to backup when my mother simply couldn’t spare the time, and they would even tag-team occasionally—one of my favorite things to watch. Each of the women was formidable in her own right, but together, they were indomitable.
I’d begun to formally work for my mother at fourteen—the same age at which she had begun to work for her father—and I both loved and resented that my place was ever at her elbow. I followed her example, finding great joy in cultivating skills for the purpose of “being a good soldier in this man’s army,” as she put it. I memorized phone and credit card numbers so I could rattle them off for my mom at a moment’s notice. I managed the contacts on her phone and the music on her iPod. I designed and maintained spreadsheets to track litigation and tax expenses, and wrote and edited Westboro press releases. I learned accounting to audit the law firm accounts, and Spanish to give interviews to Univision and translate the FAQ on our church website—all before the end of my first year of college. And yet, it often seemed that none of that mattered. My mother could be just impossible to please, and at times I worried that I could never actually grow up under her constant gaze and micromanagement of every detail of my existence.
But when it worked, and all the more as I grew older and learned to accept these constraints, I would cry in gratitude to God for designing this little piece of the world for me, and me for it. My heart swelled when I heard what my mother had begun to call me. “Megan is my right hand,” she would say. Each day I had the privilege of being saturated in our doctrines and these questions of eternal significance. I often likened my mother to the hub of a wheel: all roads led to her as she went about orchestrating the day-to-day operations of the church. It became my greatest treasure to support the work of this virtuous woman, to be given a front-row seat for the drama that was forever unfolding before the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. These were the wars of the Lord, and they would be remembered from everlasting to everlasting.
The peace I felt in my role was thanks in no small measure to Margie. Given our similar personalities, she sympathized with how difficult it could get for me at home. She, too, was put off by my mother’s particular, carping nature—and so when things went south with Mom, it was Margie to whom I turned for succor. Nothing ever got me back on track faster than the gentle entreaties of my beloved aunt. She sent me a message one day just before my twenty-fourth birthday, and I printed it out and kept it in the top drawer of my desk as a daily reminder. I could hardly read my mother’s emails of correction for the dreadful cacophony they sounded in my mind, full of misplaced accusations of deliberate sabotage and the rage of ALL CAPS. Margie was the epitome of kindness. Of reasonableness. Her email read in part:
Hello little Megan whom I love.
You have been near and dear to me since you were born, and you are one of my most favorite people in all the world. More important, I am convinced God has done a work on your heart, and you desire to serve Him.
Like all of us, you have specific struggles in the flesh. It is a piece of rebellion, and it comes out the most