and it will go away.
* * *
As it turned out, 2011 was conducive to cover-ups.
June marked the beginning of the most ambitious construction project we had ever undertaken: an enormous house for my aunt and uncle and their seven children, to be built on a concrete foundation directly across the street from my front door. The entire frame of the house would go up in the first eleven days—“Push Week”—which were full of scorching sun and ninety-degree temperatures that had us all baking. Sweat and sunscreen soaked through our clothes, but the work site was alive with the high-pitched buzzing of table saws and the insistent instruction to “Measure twice, cut once!” from the men who’d taken vacation days from work to lead the project. By the time we installed the roof trusses, we were sunburned down to the last minion and an accident with a framing nailer had sent a cousin to the emergency room—but the frame was up. Push Week was a success.
Amazingly, there were several unfamiliar faces around the construction site, too. In an unprecedented turn of events, new members were joining the church at an astonishing rate. Ten years had passed since Steve and his family had joined Westboro—the only outsiders who had come to stay in the quarter-century I’d been alive—but in the span of just a few months, a flood of new people arrived. A twenty-something man from the U.K. Another from a suburb of Chicago. A young woman my age, along with her three children. And an older couple from rural Kansas who had divorced before joining Westboro. It was the second marriage for both husband and wife, and—as our sign paraphrased Jesus—DIVORCE + REMARRIAGE = ADULTERY. Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery. It seemed impossible that anyone would make such a sacrifice—a happy marriage that had given them two sweet young boys—in order to join our church. After a lifetime of hostile rejection of our beliefs, we took this sudden profusion of converts as a clear sign that the Lord was with us, and that the end of all things was at hand. The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise.
My work for the church also expanded during this period. Most of my mother’s tasks had been reassigned to other church members, and several of them had fallen to me. In addition to coordinating the creation and publication of our news releases, I was now the keeper of Westboro’s picket schedules, both local and national. If I had questions, I was to report to my father or Steve, rather than to my mother—still sitting at her desk five feet from mine. It was a relief to have a degree of freedom from her intense overmanagement, but I could never feel good about it. I had been taught all my days to honor and obey my mother. I felt a growing sense of disgust at her shaming, and I wanted desperately not to contribute to it. Whenever I made or received a call about church matters that my mother had once overseen, I walked out of our office in haste. I would not cause her more pain with pointed reminders of the position she had lost.
Meanwhile, the unusual success I was finding on Twitter and in the media had caught the attention of the Kansas City Star. They sent a reporter to Topeka, and I spent many hours during that spring, summer, and fall giving interviews for a profile. The reporter shadowed me at work and at protests, and came to hear a sermon one Sunday. He even attended one of our summer birthday parties, watching me play volleyball and sit poolside with my cousins and nieces, happily fielding requests to tame their long hair with French braids. His questions were typical and without end, and I reflexively responded in the same way to the same pressure I had always felt when representing the church: to present a strong, united front. To show no weakness. To never admit—even to myself—that the church could be wrong. “There’s something wonderfully liberating in the notion that you’re one hundred percent right,” my grandfather often noted with calm and confidence. It was another conundrum—“mindfucks,” as Grace began to call them—that I wouldn’t see until much later: That we could experience such a deep sense of personal shame and humility, saying with