Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church Read Free

of Dad's students would pitch in and babysit. Our first week there, Dad took me on a bike ride around the campus and showed me the different buildings that meant something to him--the humanities building where he taught, the film school, the law school, and the building that housed his office. I thought it was so cool, seeing all the students walking and biking around the campus. I quickly became an avid KU fan, and Dad encouraged my interest by taking me to all of the home basketball games.
    When we were at the sports hall, we'd see the players, who were like celebrities to me, working out or doing physical therapy. Even Dad got kind of giddy when we saw them. He embraced our new life, and I think he wanted me to be as excited about Kansas as he was. He loved it when we expanded our horizons and our minds, especially on his terms.
    From my earliest memories, everything I did, from dance recitals to fishing trips, was with my parents. The two, Steve and Luci Drain, had been together for what seemed like forever. They met in junior high school in Florida when they were both thirteen, and dated through all of high school.
    My mother, a beautiful and slender blue-eyed blonde, loved my father, and as a good Catholic she married him so she wouldn't have to feel guilty about having sex out of wedlock. They tied the knot on May 5, 1983, as soon as they both turned eighteen.
    My father rarely spoke about his early childhood with me, and when he did, he sounded quite bitter about his parents. Based on this and his strained relationships with his family, I guessed that it must have been a very unhappy childhood. He had been born in Tampa, Florida, in 1965, and named after his father, Steven Sr. His mother, Joy, was an aspiring actress who had appeared in several small roles in feature films and television commercials. She was dramatic, flamboyant, and a bit of a narcissist. From what I understood, she paid very little attention to my dad because she was obsessively focused on her acting career. She had already been married several times and had given birth to two daughters before she married my grandfather, and she remained married to him for only a short time. I had no idea how old my father was when his parents divorced or what their reasons were, but he told me he had been very angry when his parents split, and he blamed it on his mother. He said he would never forgive her. Whether or not this was true, it was clear to me that he deeply resented her.
    Both of Dad's parents eventually remarried. My father lived with his mother, his two half sisters, and his stepfather, whom he called Popper. His two half sisters had different fathers, so nobody in his household had the same set of parents. It seemed like my father had had a love/hate relationship with his sisters. He was the youngest and the only boy, which made him a natural target for their sisterly teasing. The two girls played mean-spirited pranks on him all the time, which of course made him angry. He told me he was also bullied at school. He had been considered a runt until he was in sixth grade, when he shot up to six foot two. After his growth spurt, the bullying stopped.
    Dad's biological father remarried a woman my father didn't particularly like.
    She also brought children into the marriage, so he had stepbrothers and stepsisters on that side as well. He really distanced himself from all of them and everybody else from his childhood. We didn't have any photos of his family around the house. I got the sense that being around them made him sad, but he never talked about it, and I never asked. I had two sets of grandparents on my father's side alone, and there were so many half- and stepsiblings that when I'd see them at a rare Drain family event, I didn't even know how anyone was related to whom, if they were steps, or halves, or in-laws.
    My father didn't make much of an effort to stay in touch with any of them.
    Because he didn't care for his stepmother, he took me to visit