ask “Are you Catholic?” upon learning that I was one of six, seven, eight, nine children. Birth control wasn’t something I realized was even possible, let alone widely practiced. I just knew the verses. Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
“The womb business is God’s business,” Mom summarized. “You can’t outsmart the Lord!”
The Catholic stance against artificial contraception was a relatively fringe position, but—in a pattern that would extend to virtually every aspect of our lives—Westboro Baptist Church was prepared to take it even further, to the letter of the Scriptures as we understood them. And when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren. It was for God alone to give or withhold children, and even the “natural family planning” endorsed by Catholics was unacceptable. The single time I heard about an aunt of mine attempting to defy God and “counting the days” to avoid pregnancy, it was in the context of her miscounting. She and her husband had been struggling to provide for the six children they had already, but when she’d tried to take matters into her own hands, she’d ended up pregnant with twins. God was teaching her a lesson, my mother said, because my aunt had failed to trust Him. It wasn’t for her to decide when or how many children to have, it wasn’t for her to have any feeling or opinion on the matter at all, except to be grateful to the Lord for each one.
And oh, was my mama grateful. I remember feeling it most in the music, when she would sing to us, always singing. Before I turned five and had to join in with the rank and file for Saturday morning cleaning marathons, my little sister Bekah and I would dance on matching window seats in the living room, mouthing along as Christopher Cross or Fleetwood Mac blared from the big stereo while the others cleaned. Dad would pick us up and twirl us around, and Mom would sashay over with a dusting rag in one hand and a can of Pledge in the other—that sickly sweet scent of chemical lemons filtering through the whole house—and she’d lean in to kiss our cheeks, serenading us at the top of her voice: “No, I will never be the same without your love / I’ll live alone, try so hard to rise above.” This was the same era in which I sat just to her left during church, when she belted out the hymns so high and so loud that it hurt my ears. I discovered that to protect myself from the sonic onslaught, I could stick a finger into my left ear, press myself into my mother’s side, and listen to her sing from inside her body. It was so soothing, the warmth and the vibrations and the feeling of her arm holding me close as I tucked into her. I didn’t know then that this special place at her side would always be mine. That as her eldest daughter, I would become to her what she had become to her father—and as that relationship had defined my mother, so this one would define me. For I was tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother.
Sam. Josh. Meg. Bek. Zay. Zach. Grace. Gabe. Jonah. Noah. Luke.
SamJoshMegBekZayZachGraceGabeJonahNoahLuke.
It would be entirely reasonable to expect that my mother’s dedication to doing it all might wane with the birth of each additional child, that it would be impossible for her to maintain that commitment to having her children, her legal career, and her work for our church. Instead, the opposite was true. As our family swelled with each passing year, so, too, did the church’s profile and the added pressure we all faced as a result. I’ve never known another woman who could have stood up under the strain of the burden my mother carried, not without collapsing under the weight of it. She had an inexhaustible supply of strength, tenacity, and resourcefulness—whose origins, it seemed to me, must surely have been divine.
* * *
Soon after our initial protests at Gage Park, our war with the city of Topeka began to escalate. Every anti-Westboro effort they made only served to strengthen our resolve, and we answered each one by dramatically expanding the pace and variety of our pickets. Nearly two years in, we now targeted the