by Libby Phelps
As I turned to leave, I got a text message from my mom asking how my day was going. I wanted so badly to respond, to tell her I wasn’t having a good day, I was in fact leaving her forever. I wanted to tell her one last time that I loved her. But I couldn’t. A clean break might somehow make it easier, lessen the pain for everyone. I threw the phone on the bed, and shut the door behind me.
THE DAY I MOVED OUT WAS SIMULTANEOUSLY THE MOST joyful and most traumatic day of my life. I knew I would never see my family again. But they forced me to make a choice between a life of servitude under the strict rule of the church—a life lived in fear, paranoia, hatred, and hostility—and a life that was unknown, uncertain, but one of my own making. For them, faith meant slavery to the church and to their hypocritical ideals of love and loyalty to God. But somehow, by some power, I had found a greater kind of faith. I was walking the tightrope between faith and freedom, with no end in sight. It was time to cut the wire.
CHAPTER SIX
A DIFFICULT ADJUSTMENT, AND FINDING LOVE
AS MEG AND I PULLED OUR CARS AWAY FROM THE CURB, I FELT like I was in a dream. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said out loud, to no one. “I can’t believe it.” I thought about the pair of shoes I’d left on my bed, a new pair of sandals my mom had just bought me. It was too late to go back and get them. She’d think I didn’t like them, that I was ungrateful for her having given them to me in the first place. So stupid of me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was the last gift she had given me. Nausea welled up in me as I imagined my family finding out I was gone. I rolled down the window, wondering if I might actually throw up.
As we rounded the corner, I kept a lookout for family members walking along the sidewalk in the neighborhood. Would I see Shirl? She seemed to know everything and be everywhere—maybe she had somehow found out about my plan? Or what about my uncle Charles, who lived across the street from us and worked from home? What if I was spotted? What if someone came after me and tried to stop me? Would I have the strength to still go through with it? I already missed the comfort of being there. I didn’t know if I’d be able to resist the pull of someone actually coming after me to bring me home.
But no one did. The streets were quiet. As we pulled onto the highway, I realized I was free. I mulled that word over with a heavy heart. I didn’t feel liberated; I was terrified and achingly sad. I might never see my parents again. The thought stabbed into my gut like a knife.
Another even more horrifying thought gnawed away at me, looming larger than even losing my family: I’d just given up my chance at eternal paradise. Once I made the choice to reject the church and join the rest of the world, I became a worker of iniquity—doomed to spend my afterlife brutally tormented with fire and brimstone in hell, my face full of flames and worms forever eating away at me. Was it really worth it to prove my point in this world to suffer so much in the next? I could only imagine what would be said about me at the next church service. I was anathema maranatha, guilty of the worst crime in the Bible: knowingly turning my back on God. And Gramps had tried so hard to get me into heaven.
IN LAWRENCE, ABOUT A HALF HOUR AWAY, I MOVED MY CARFUL of belongings into a colleague’s spare room. He had agreed to this arrangement that day, but didn’t seem all that happy to actually see me when I showed up at his small white house. He hung around in the living room as I hurried back and forth carrying what was left of my life, clumsily opening and shutting the chained gate outside with every trip. Once I had everything unloaded, Meg asked if I wanted her to stay. “No, thanks, I’ll be fine,” I said with a big smile, grateful for years of training on how to seem like everything was OK even when you were falling apart inside. I drove her home and waved as I pulled away. After returning to my temporary shelter, I retreated to the small room I had filled up and closed the door partway, not wanting to be rude by shutting it all the way.
This was crazy. What had I done? What on earth was I going to do? My coworkers had made me think I was capable of taking care of myself, but faced with the reality of it, I began to suspect they were wrong. How could you go from a life where everything was taken care of for you to knowing how to live on your own?
I sat on a crate and stared blankly, letting the numbness take over. At least I didn’t have to pretend to be cheerful in here. The smell of incense drifted in from the living room. Patchouli. Maybe my massage therapist friend had intended it to be comforting, but I found it sort of awful. I closed the door all the way, as softly as I could, and continued to sit and stare.
At night, I curled up in a blanket on the couch in the living room. I turned off the light but I couldn’t turn off my brain, which circled back endlessly to one thought: I was likely never going to see my parents again. I hadn’t even had a chance to say good-bye. For the first time since we’d set out to get my things, I let myself give in to tears. Eventually, I tired myself out from crying enough to fall asleep for a few hours.
When I woke up, I realized it was Saturday. I had moved out of my house on Friday the thirteenth, as it happened. A whole weekend stretched out in front of me, planless. At home, this would have been unthinkable; there was always a way to use your time productively for the good of the church, even if it was just a few minutes in between other tasks. I had no idea what to do with myself. Desperate to keep busy, I called my boss, Carol, on the pretext of checking in to see if she needed any help. She saw through me, though.
“Are you OK?” she asked. “Why don’t you move in over here instead, for the time being?” She insisted, and I accepted gratefully. If I stayed here, I was just going to barricade myself in that storage room and ruminate on how I’d ruined my life and was headed straight for hell.
As it turned out, that was mostly what I did at my boss’s house too, except that she lived in a mansion with a swimming pool in the backyard. It was very luxurious, but I spent the majority of those first weeks there in a spare bedroom on the second floor. I worked as much as I possibly could. At my family’s insistence, I had always worked four days a week instead of five, so as to have a weekday to devote to the church—babysitting, cleaning, helping out at the law office. Now I picked up shifts for a fifth day too, and was grateful for the mental distraction.
“You’re doing so well!” coworkers kept telling me. Everyone was very encouraging and I didn’t want to let them down; the last thing I needed was to make a spectacle of myself. So I kept my loneliness and sadness to myself, put on a smile, and pretended everything was fine. When work was over, though, I was forced to deal with my own thoughts.
I didn’t miss the daily Bible discussions in the evenings, or the long sermons at church on Sunday. But I desperately missed the routine, and my family. What was Megan doing right now? Or Sara? Were they all talking about me? Had they been told never to talk to me again?
I became obsessed with the thought that I needed to buy my own house, though I didn’t really know how I’d go about doing that. So I began by buying random kitchen items: a dish towel, a spatula. It felt like preparation. I didn’t know how to think bigger than that.
At the same time, I lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t need any of my preparations, because the world was probably going to end. My family had been saying this with increasing frequency in the months before I left—that the signs of the time indicated the Lord would be returning within the next couple of years. Now, I would walk down the street and suddenly be gripped by panic that something terrible was going to happen to me, as punishment for leaving the only true Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. When I’d been a Westboro member, I’d been taught to be happy about anything bad that happened in the world, as this was just more evidence the Lord would be returning soon. Now that I was on the outside, I felt terror at what might become of me when the day of reckoning was at hand.
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER LEAVING, I EMAILED MY MOTHER. KEEPING my note as brief and impersonal as possible—despite feeling desperate to tell her how sorry I was and how much I missed her and my dad and Sara—I
told her I intended to pay her and my sister back as soon as I could for the loan they’d given me to buy my new car. As it turned out, she forwarded that email to Shirl, who wrote back on my mother’s behalf.
“Your mom, dad, and Sara would prefer that you not communicate with them directly. They asked me to address unresolved issues with you,” she wrote. “About the car: they are not willing to carry your loan, we must not be encumbered with the cares of this life.” It was such a Shirl thing to say. She went on to instruct me to immediately take out a loan for the full amount I owed them—over $13,000.
Busy with work, and my own depression, I ignored my email inbox for several days, and the message sat there unread. In the meantime, incensed that I hadn’t written back right away, Shirl had flown into action, assigning someone in the church—I still don’t know who—to come and take my car. My parents had had an extra key to my new Honda Civic hybrid, so I knew that’s how it had happened.
One afternoon, at my PT office, I looked out the window and realized the car was missing. I was with a patient, so I kept my sense of alarm to myself and went on working. As soon as he’d left, I got onto the computer and checked my email, seeing Shirl’s blast of rage for the first time. In addition to all the invective, she’d told me I needed to put the car and insurance in my name only. After I’d done this, she said, she would consider giving the car back—but she’d have to see how she felt at the time.
Frustrated but not all that surprised at this turn of events, I switched the title and arranged for a friend to bring the paperwork to Shirl as proof, and to pick up my car. But it wasn’t that easy; Shirl wouldn’t allow a third party to be involved, turning my friend away with a curt, “Tell Libby she’ll need to deal with me directly.” I decided, instead, to call the police and report the car as stolen. They believed me—they were familiar with the antics of Westboro, and most of them viewed the church as a nuisance. They escorted me and two of my coworkers, Brandon and Faith, to Shirl’s house to get the car. The police handled all the interaction while I stayed in the car, slouching down as low as possible in the back seat to avoid being seen or, worse, having to see my immediate family. But I wanted to know anyway.
“What’s going on? What’s going on?” I asked Brandon. “It looks like a swarm of ants,” he said, uncomfortably laughing while describing the way my family members were coming out of their houses to investigate, video cameras running, yelling to one another. I had expected nothing less from my family, of course, but I could tell Brandon was a little stunned by the intensity of the scene. “Here they come with their cameras,” he warned.
I slumped down even further. “We need to move,” I said. “Drive to the first stop sign and turn right. Park on the side of the road.” What was I so afraid of? That they would try to talk me into coming back? That they wouldn’t? We waited silently for the police to call me, which they did less than five minutes later. They arranged to meet us at a nearby McDonald’s, telling me that Shirl had initially lied to them, saying she had no idea what car they were talking about. The cop rolled his eyes as he described his conversation with her, and boy, did I understand where he was coming from. “They have their cameras, but we have our cameras, too,” he said. “We’ll get you your car back.” Five hours later, I was back in my car. The cops had told me they’d get a search warrant from the attorney general if Shirl didn’t comply, and being a lawyer, I guess she knew when she was beaten.
EMBOLDENED AFTER HAVING BEATEN SHIRL THIS ONE TIME, I tried to open myself up to as many new experiences as possible. One April night I went to Brandon’s house with several of his friends to have dinner and watch a movie. An evening activity like this would have been virtually unheard of before; it would have immediately stirred up suspicion that I was “doing things I ought not to be,” as Shirl had put it so many times.
My head spun as I drove to Brandon’s, and I realized I was wearing my glasses and my contact lenses simultaneously. I breathed a sigh of relief, because I’d thought for a minute my eyesight was going in addition to everything else in my life falling apart.
Brandon cooked dinner and we all watched an animated Disney movie. I felt comfortable enough with him and the others to lie slumped on the sofa, which was new for me. I was used to feeling so awkward and formal around other people—anyone who wasn’t a relative, really—that I’d sit ramrod-straight. At one point, one of the other girls there did a shot of liquor. I knew that was something I wasn’t remotely ready for.
WHEN MY BIRTHDAY ROLLED AROUND A MONTH AFTER LEAVING, I figured I’d just pretend it wasn’t happening. Since my family had never celebrated individual birthdays, I wasn’t in the habit of doing it anyway. But that morning when I arrived at the physical therapy office, Meg and Brandon had filled the clinic with balloons. Brandon peeked through the doorway, a cake in his hands, followed by Meg.
“Happy birthday,” they said quietly, rather than shouting. “We didn’t want to startle you by hiding in here or yelling,” Meg added. I laughed, which came out as more of a croak due to the cold I’d been nursing, then started to cry in spite of myself. I’d always wanted a surprise party.
On the table was a hilariously oversized birthday card. When I opened it, it played Reel 2 Real’s “I Like to Move It,” which made me laugh more. Brandon put down the cake, which he’d made from scratch, and dished out three slices on paper plates. He handed me a gift bag, and I unwrapped the tissue paper around a can opener.
“We know you’re buying stuff for a new place,” he said, awkwardly but kindly. It was an odd gift, but they really did get it; they knew I was in a strange place, and that can opener was a sweet show of support.
That afternoon, they took me to Maurice’s to go shopping for new clothes, as I’d left a lot of mine behind. I had always loved shopping with my sister and cousins, and I felt out of place doing it with anyone but them. It felt strange and wrong and liberating to be able to try on anything I wanted, without fear of Shirl thinking it was too revealing, without having to put it to the 4B test. “Are you guys sure you want to be doing this?” I kept asking Brandon and Meg. I felt like I was a burden, like my learning curve for life was so slow, they must be bored with this kind of thing. But they assured me it was fine, that I was doing fine.
As nice as my coworkers were, I still didn’t quite believe they thought of me as a friend. I had only ever really relied on my family for friendship. And now I couldn’t talk to any of them. But I needed to connect with someone about what was going on, and I didn’t want to overburden my coworkers. So I did what seemed natural at the time: I called a Kansas City radio station, 96.5, The Buzz. We used to call them all the time to request songs—and to also tell them they were going to hell.
They were glad to hear from me, and put me on with a DJ named Lazlo I’d talked to frequently. We set up a time for me to talk with him on the air that afternoon. I told him I’d left the church—it felt strange not to be lecturing him about God’s wrath. He said he was proud of me for leaving. He didn’t expect an apology for all the mean things I’d said over the years; he seemed genuinely happy for me that I had gotten out. He asked why I’d done it and I told him about the bikini. “I know that sounds stupid and trivial,” I said, “but it wasn’t about the bikini, really. It was the way they treated me.” He said he was really proud of me again and asked if I needed any help or any money. I laughed and said no. As we talked, I thought about how often we’d listened to this station and wondered if maybe it was a way to at least let my family know I was OK. Megan and Jael always listened to this station; perhaps they’d hear this and realize I was still the same Libby I’d always been, that I hadn’t been swallowed up or corrupted or instantly changed by the evils of the outside world.
I didn’t take any money from the station, but I did say yes to Lazlo’s offer of concert tickets, to a show at the Midland Theater in Kansas City. It was the first rock concert I’d ever been to, some local band I’d never heard of. I took a female patient of mine who’d beco
me a friend, and I wore a dress I’d bought in Puerto Rico but had always been too scared to actually wear in public. It was silky, black and gold, and had a slit all the way down to the belly button. “I like your dress!” said a woman standing next to me at the show. “Thank you!” I said. “I’ve never worn anything like it before!” We were in the front row, and I had a great time. I danced and laughed with my friend and with complete strangers. I loved the rock band, with its long-haired lead singer. My mind flitted only occasionally to how disgusted my family would have been at my behavior; I’d truly joined the ranks of the fallen.
ONE OF THE FORBIDDEN THINGS I WAS THE MOST EXCITED—and terrified—to do was cut my hair. I’d thought about it for years, what it would be like not to have the weight of the locks that went down past my rear end. It was a sensation I’d never have known staying in the church, but now I had cut myself free, so it seemed like a good time to get a literal cut, too. My whole life I had been defined by my hair, to some extent; it was the thing that made all of us stand out in Topeka. To alter it would be a definitive move forward. Was I ready?
I chose a salon in Lawrence called Dash, which my coworkers had told me was a nice place with friendly haircutters. When the appointment time neared, my feelings of nervousness intensified. While I waited in the lobby, I found myself tearing at my thumb’s cuticle, like I did whenever I was anxious about something.
The woman they’d assigned me had dyed blonde hair and lots of makeup on; she clearly spent a lot of time on her looks. When I told her it was my first-ever haircut, her blue-shadowed eyes widened.