Dad, Mom, Me, and Jehovah

In Kim’s loving Jehovah’s Witness home, something is very wrong. At age six, Kim’s world is upended by the frightening symptoms of her mother’s Lupus. Her parents, also reeling, attempt to mask the hard truths of the diagnosis by steeping the family in the church’s utopian teachings. They push Kim to peddle Watchtower magazines, teach Witness dogma from the platform of the Kingdom Hall, and shun friends who stray from the religion. 

When her father dies unexpectedly, however, Kim’s mother withdraws into grief and Kim is left to face a world where her mother, as she once knew her, is absent. Seesawing between lucidity and bouts of psychosis, Kim’s mother employs her as caregiver, and in the hours outside her attendance at elementary school, Kim struggles to meet her mother’s requests and her religion’s demands. Believing the church’s definition of truth is the only path to God’s paradise earth, where her mother will be healed and her father brought back to life, Kim soon gets baptized as a Jehovah’s Witness. However, despite her newfound dedication to God, Kim is confused by the ever-changing rules put forward by her leaders and begins rebelling in secret.

Relief comes, seemingly, through marriage. Wanting to flee the hardship of her situation, Kim weds a man who appears to be her perfect match: he comes from a highly esteemed Witness family who also, behind closed doors, break the religion’s rules. The marriage quickly becomes an unhappy one, yet Kim unquestioningly follows the tenets of the church that tell her divorce is forbidden. 

During that time, she travels from the sticks of California to the desert of Arizona to the bustle of Los Angeles, navigating between the dusty roads of mobile home parks, where she preaches from door to door, to the linoleumed hallways of hospitals and rest homes, where she takes her mother to receive care, to the back rooms of Kingdom Halls, where elders counsel her, castigate her, and strip away her dignity. Along the way, with the help of friends from the outside world, she wades through the long-buried grief of her childhood and finally gathers enough courage to discard the dictates of others and find her truth within.