Dad, Mom, Jehovah, and ME

In Kim’s loving Jehovah’s Witness home, something is very wrong. At age six, her world is upended by her mother's frightening Lupus symptoms. Shaken themselves, her parents mask the diagnosis by steeping the family in the church’s utopian teachings. They train Kim to peddle Watchtower magazines, teach Witness dogma from Kingdom Hall platforms, and shun friends who stray from the religion. 

When her father dies unexpectedly, Kim’s mother withdraws into grief, and Kim is left to face a world where her mom, as she once knew her, is absent. Seesawing between lucidity and psychosis, Kim’s mother employs her as caregiver, and in the hours outside elementary school, Kim struggles to meet both her mother’s requests and the religion’s demands. Believing the church’s truth is the only path to God’s paradise, where her mother will be healed and her father returned, Kim gets baptized. Yet despite her dedication, she grows confused by the religion's ever-changing rules and begins rebelling in secret.

Marriage offers fleeting relief. Kim weds a man who seems her perfect match: he comes from an esteemed Witness family who, behind closed doors, also break the religion’s rules. The union quickly turns unhappy, yet Kim follows the tenets of the church that forbid divorce. 

During that time, she travels from the sticks of Utah to the desert of New Mexico to the bustle of El Paso, navigating dusty mobile home parks, where she preaches from door to door, linoleumed hospital hallways, where she takes her mother for care, and the back rooms of Kingdom Halls, where elders counsel, castigate, and strip away her dignity. Along the way, aided by outside friends, she wades through long-buried childhood grief, finally gathering the courage to discard others' dictates and find her truth within.