ensure she wouldn’t rouse, and then I slowly, deliberately disentangled myself.
* * *
My mother’s troubles began with an email. My parents tried to keep it under wraps at first, and they managed to shield my siblings for a short time, but I was twenty-five. For years I had spent most hours of most days directly in my mother’s orbit. Though I didn’t know its cause, her distress was apparent to me. She and my father were spending an inordinate amount of time in heated conversation that became hushed on my approach.
After a day or two of gentle pressing on my part, my parents finally allowed me to see the message—just once, and only on my father’s iPhone for a few short moments. He hovered, antsy, so I read in haste before he could take it back. It was a disciplinary email from my eldest brother, Sam—just thirty-two at the time—and Steve, a former documentary filmmaker who’d converted and joined Westboro a decade earlier. My stomach turned as I read the accusations, which primarily surrounded the harsh, unmerciful way she could treat others in the church. I knew as well as anyone that my mother could be too zealous in correcting other church members. I’d frequently found myself on the wrong end of her sharp tongue, and I’d had a front-row seat as most of the others had, as well. Still, no one could deny that her vehemence was borne of a desire to do right by the Lord and by us, and that—as Margie had rightly noted in her message to me the year before—my mother’s hard edges had been softening for some time now. She had a remarkable tenderness that had been an example for me all my life, the very embodiment of God loveth a cheerful giver. She sacrificed for our loved ones tirelessly, the result of an uncanny ability to discern our needs and an unparalleled determination to fill them, no matter what it cost her.
I felt strongly that the case against my mother was overstated, and I was upset that these two men had chosen to stir things up while she was still recovering from surgery. It was a cowardly assault at a time when she was most vulnerable. My father seemed to agree. I could see that he and my mother were gearing up for a fight, preparing her rebuttal—which was also disheartening. I didn’t want my parents to completely discount what this email was saying, because there was some truth to the criticism. I wanted my mother to hear the legitimate critique at the heart of this email, but in overplaying their hand, Sam and Steve had offered distraction that allowed for easy dismissal. Was someone finally going to address this issue that had been a grief of mind to so many of us at various points, only to blow it with narrow-minded and overblown contentions?
It took time for me to recognize this disciplinary message for what it was: the cynical use of a genuine problem—my mother’s abrasiveness—to upend the existing structure of the church. From the moment he’d joined Westboro, it had been apparent to me that Steve wanted to take over. He’d stated his desire for leadership plainly, but was thwarted by the biblical requirements of a church leader—that he could not be a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil. I’d viewed this naked ambition as an awkward fact of church life. Now that he was not a novice, however, he appeared to be shifting focus to the other obstacle to his rise to power: the longstanding influence of my mother. For Steve, it seemed to me, her sidelining was a stepping stone.
I’ll never know exactly what occurred in the conversations that followed this email, because a fundamental transformation took hold of the church almost instantly. Throughout my life, constant, unguarded communication had been all but an object of worship at Westboro. Dozens of emails and text messages flowed through the church’s distribution lists each day, covering everything from media and lawsuits, to childcare and lawn maintenance. Members saw one another at protests, hymn-singing gatherings, the family law office, and in our common backyard. We ate dinner together, read the Bible together, exercised together. We congregated frequently for “work crews,” where teams of us would put up drywall, paint fences, make signs, mow lawns, and have “cleaning parties” at construction sites to build additions onto members’ houses. At 6 A.M. on snowy winter