that his judgment was suspect. The process became even more demeaning when he sent me down to model the new shorts for my eldest brother. I was twenty-five. Sam was thirty-two. He did not approve. Modesty required high-necked blouses, dresses or pants that covered our legs down to our knees, and covered feet—no sandals—during the Sunday church service.
My mother’s disappearance from the media was another outward indication of the shift. She had represented the church in newspapers and radio interviews the world over on an almost-daily basis, but now Steve had taken charge. I was humiliated on her behalf as I watched her awkwardly turn away from a swarm of media that had surrounded us at a protest in Ohio. They were clamoring for interviews, baffled and trying to understand our message—but preaching the Gospel was clearly less important to the elders than bringing my mother to heel. Because she had been stripped of most of her other church-related duties, as well, the Phelps-Roper home grew eerily quiet as the constant flow of reporters, cousins, and other church members ebbed to a trickle.
As sudden and jarring as these changes were, there is an image that stands out in my memory as most clearly signaling the distress of this transition period: a close-up of my littlest sister’s fingers. Grace and I paid close attention to the elders’ decisions, and the more we saw, the more troubled we became. I was practiced at justifying Westboro’s doctrines, but the cracks forming in our fortress of logic and Scripture were becoming ever more difficult to ignore. Why would we be punished for unintentionally flashing an inch of skin on our back or belly, while our brothers were permitted to swim shirtless, with all of theirs on full display? Why were girls in other Westboro families subject to more lenient rules of modesty? How could the standards of God differ from house to house? Let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing. Sam dismissed our objections, seeming to believe that they originated from a desire to dress like sluts. Grace and I knew better. That the problem went far deeper: hypocrisy, and the dawning realization that the rules we had been taught—the divine rules of a sovereign God—were being systematically replaced by the caprices of fallible men. Church members had always denied that we were “interpreting” the Bible, insisting that we were only reading and obeying what was plainly written in the Scriptures. But once I was excluded from the discussions, it soon became obvious that interpretation was inescapable—that it was happening daily, hourly, and always in ways that protected and expanded the authority of these eight elders.
Holding signs together at the pickets, sitting at our desks at home, lying side by side on my bed, Grace and I floundered, trying to make sense of it all and coming up empty. And all the while, she picked. The bits of skin around her fingernails were tiny at first, but she picked at them for weeks, tearing them off again and again until all of her fingers were scabbed and bleeding. “How did it go today?” Grace would ask in resignation when she returned home from school. I’d describe watching our mother stare unmoving at her ringing cell phone again, and then she’d answer it quietly, disappearing to the far corners of our empty house to have another conversation with my dad. Always more trouble, though she was trying to keep it from me. I’d tiptoe after her to eavesdrop on her side of the conversation—a habit I’d picked up from Sam growing up—to learn the source of the conflict. My mother was defensive, disbelieving the complaints my father was receiving: an aunt who disapproved of my mother’s tone, another vaguely unsatisfied that her mannerisms demonstrated sufficient repentance. It was as if they were actively looking for reasons to be offended. Despair was creeping toward the deepest parts of me, but I fought to keep it at bay and to comfort my sister. As I relayed the day’s events to Grace, she would pick. Pick. Pick. My reassurances about the necessity of submission—our own and our mother’s—began to sound hollow even to my own ears, and I could never say enough without resorting to lies. Instead, I bought her a box of hot-pink Hello Kitty Band-Aids and covered the tips of all ten of her mangled fingers.
“The Megan Solution,” she called it. A tendency I’d developed without realizing it.