Rose McGowan

Brave


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would only have been a matter of time, but luckily for us, my father drew the line at pedophilia, and he made secret plans to leave. We couldn’t just announce we were leaving and walk away, though. When the cult got wind of certain members wanting to leave, one of their children might disappear, or some family would get severe punishment meted out to them, as a way of teaching the others.

      And so one night, my father told us there was a man named Bepo and he was after us with a hammer. There was a car waiting for us, we got shoved in, and go go go.

      My father had left the Children of God physically, if not mentally, taking his other wife, Esther. As for my mother, all I know is that she was left behind. There were so many women in the cult that I didn’t have a firm grasp on my mother as an individual. It was just one more level of destabilization in what would be a pattern for me in my life.

      Now that we were in this small medieval town, I was sent to my first public school. It was very confusing. In the cult, we had worn whatever fit from the pile of donated and hand-me-down clothes, and I mostly wore my brother’s clothes. Now I was assigned to wear a pink button-down smock. I preferred the blue smock and asked why I couldn’t wear it instead. I asked the teacher about this logic, and she told me because I was a girl I had to wear pink. Only the boys wore blue. I thought that was some of the dumbest shit I had ever heard. I was furious that I was now different from my brother for an arbitrary reason. I didn’t understand why I now had to wear pink. I still don’t.

      On the way to and from the village school, I buried insects. I had a knack for seeing insects in peril. I would arrive at school puffy eyed from shedding tears at my self-made bug funerals. I’m sure I was unnerving as a child because of my intensity. I know I was because I basically was the same as I am now, and I tend to unnerve people to this day. I saw past everything, all the spiderwebs that people often hide behind so they can tell themselves a story about themselves. It made my father in particular very uncomfortable. Like I said, he may have left the Children of God, but the need to be a demigod preacher never left him, and suddenly he was a cult leader without a flock. He expected the women and children around him to worship him, and I never did. To have somebody around who’s staring at you and puncturing through the falsehoods you’ve established to live your life must have been unsettling.

      Thus, in an ironic twist after all he’d put me through, my father lectured me on how essential it was for me to be more childlike. Couldn’t he see that he was the reason I couldn’t be? When the onus of survival is put upon a child, surely that hinders her ability to go play with a doll like other good little girls. I could lay that squarely at my father’s feet.

      During this period, chaos reigned in my father’s childhood home. My dad and his siblings would alternate wearing the one pair of shoes they had. Only the child wearing shoes could get to school and have a hot meal. It breaks my heart to think of them taking little forged notes from a “parent,” written in a child’s scrawl, asking the grocer to please give them bread that would be repaid later. A gang of men broke in one night when they were alone and ransacked the house. The children hid in the refrigerator.

      I would like to say I can’t imagine their terror, but it wouldn’t be true. I can relate to the instability, hunger, raging mental illness and its fallout. These are all old friends of mine, and my family’s.

      Had he gotten help earlier in life, it would no doubt have saved my relationship with him, and his relationship with my brothers and sisters, his relationship with art, his relationship with the world, with women, probably with everything. As for my mother, with her porcelain skin, long, reddish-blond hair, and blue eyes, she was a magnet for the wrong kind of boy. The wrong kind of boys turned into the wrong kind of men. She ran away by the age of fifteen. At eighteen she met my father, Daniel. By nineteen she was pregnant and in a cult.

      While my mother was pregnant with me, her mother, Sharon, climbed the Three Sisters Mountain in Oregon and tragically slipped, plummeting to her death. She was thirty-seven. I was told that’s why I’d always be sad, because my mother was sad during my pregnancy. For years I thought my intense internal sadness was due to this, but later I realized it had more to do with brain chemistry.