Free Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lisa Pulitzer, Lauren Drain

everything with my sister. Taylor was still in public school and often brought her friends home in the afternoons. I'd hang out with them just for the sake of having company, even though they were five years younger. On weekends, Dad let me go to the beach, as long as I was with Taylor. When I complained that I never got to see my friends, he'd encourage me to keep up my correspondence with Megan and the other girls in Topeka, anticipating we'd be moving there sometime soon. They were all I had for contemporaries, even if they lived far away, and when I wrote any of them a letter, I'd get one back about a week later. And of course, our pen-pal relationship earned me Dad's approval, which was such a huge relief.
    One day in March, my father got off his daily phone call with Shirley with great news. A very small house was coming available on "the block," the term church members used to refer to the homes surrounding the church building in Topeka. Shirley told him it was ours to rent if we wanted to move to Kansas.
    When Dad mentioned a potential move to me, I thought about it seriously for a couple of days before I decided that I loved the idea. I was sick and tired of living in isolation in Florida, and I really liked Megan and the other girls, so I knew I already had a built-in community of friends in Topeka. I had already decided that Dad's new religion wasn't bad at all, and I liked that it had a grand purpose. He and I could spread the church's message together at pickets and finally be a team again.
    Mom was not nearly as enthusiastic. Dad was in their bedroom reading scripture when she went to talk to him about it. "If you think we are moving to Topeka, you are out of your f----ing mind," she said, blocking the doorway.
    My mother was not one to swear. She used profanity only if she was really upset about something. We didn't have the resources to keep moving, she argued. The student loan payments were dragging down everything, and we were relying solely on one income in the house.
    But this wasn't the only issue. She still had lingering questions about the church and some of their platforms, especially their view on the "chosen ones." Mom also didn't agree with the hard-line nature of their messages.
    Even though she objected to the homosexual lifestyle, too, she found the church's judgment overly harsh.
    But Dad seemed to be full of answers for her. I overheard him tell her he was pawning my baseball card collection to help pay for the move. I had a signed Babe Ruth card in there that was very valuable. Dad had wanted me to save it for my adulthood so that I would have something to fall back on in case of an emergency. He never even mentioned it to me before he pawned it and the rest of my collection. I knew he had no intention of buying it back, but I didn't jump in and try to stop him. I was tired of fighting with him, and I knew that when he made up his mind about something, that was it.
    Mom eventually did whatever my father said, so the argument about moving didn't last long. He'd been like this for so long that it was almost comical that she thought she had a vote. She would never entertain the idea of separating from him and splitting up our family. When he explained to her that this move was in my best interest, and would get me away from the heathen boys and bad influences all around me in Florida, Mom became much more amenable to the idea. She wasn't as tight with her family as when we'd first moved back to Florida two years earlier. My father had slowly been isolating her from them after he hadn't been able to convince them that his commitment to the church was serious.
    She started letting her family know that a move back to Kansas was imminent. They knew that it had to do with the church, but they were also aware that if Dad had something in his head, my mother was going to go along with it. Uncle Mark was the only one who challenged them at all.
    "What the hell are you doing?" he asked my father. Dad tried