I stood eyeing myself in the mirror before my second day of public high school. At 15 years old, I was determined not to get kicked out of class again.
“Do I look okay?” I asked my twin sister, Tamar. I was wearing a bomber jacket, Dickies, and Converse All Star tennis shoes. The day before, I had been dismissed from class for showing too much cleavage, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake again.
“Looks fine to me,” Tamar said.
I tucked an issue of Seventeen magazine inside my jacket. In that magazine was the secret I had just discovered and shared with my siblings: we had grown up in a cult. This was the reason we felt out of place and unable to fit in after moving to California. The day before, I’d read an article about a girl who had escaped a cult and an accompanying quiz consisting of five questions. If I answered “yes” to at least three, it said, I might have grown up in a cult. I answered “yes” to all five.
Growing up in the Children of God I hadn’t been allowed to make any decisions for myself. Father David dictated how we lived and where we lived. From the clothes I wore to the food I ate to the friends I had – everything had been decided for me. After the death of Father David, our leader on the compounds in Southeast Asia, the cult slowly disbanded. Now, we were living in Dad’s home state of California after growing up hearing that America was a forbidden land, the epicenter of evil, and would be the first to burn in hell in God’s judgment during Armageddon before the Great Apocalypse that would come in 1993. It was now 1996.
High school was my first chance at normalcy, and I wanted nothing more than to be normal after living a life over which I had no control. I cut my hair and dyed it an awful carrot color, and I complemented my new hairstyle by wearing jeans, jewelry, tennis shoes – anything that had been forbidden.
On the way out the door, I passed Mom in the kitchen getting our six younger siblings ready for school. A few months earlier she had found out she had advanced cervical cancer and was now getting daily radiation treatment. Even after 12 children and two stillbirths, Mom rarely went to see a doctor in the cult. Father David did not encourage modern medicine and would have disapproved of her decision to seek medical care even though her cancer was life-threatening. Dad had enrolled in college to try to get a job, something he wasn’t allowed to do before even though he had excelled as a geology student right before joining the Children of God.
My parents were too busy trying to make ends meet to worry too much about us older kids and our adjustment, but when they did try to control us, Dad was stern and Mom was unforgiving as if we kids were the ones who had done something wrong when we all knew we hadn’t; they were the ones who joined a cult and we were born into it. My siblings and I reacted to the newfound revelation from Seventeen magazine about our childhood in different ways.
John, my oldest brother, was holding down multiple jobs and after work stayed out all night with his friends, partying in the rave scene. Mary Ann, my older sister, had frequent breakdowns and started acting strange, dressing in colorful clothes and telling her friends to “eat dirt” (for a while that was all she said to anyone). Heidi, my younger sister, spent much of her time away from home with new friends who lived down the street and dressed in black, wore smeared eye makeup, and chain-smoked cigarettes. She started listening to bands like Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine. One day she came home with a neat row of razor slits on the insides of her wrists. When Dad drilled her about it, she said, “Shut up. How dare you tell me what to do? You raised us in a cult!” Soon this was our response to our parents’ every feeble attempt to manage us, or perhaps step into their role as parents for the first time. In the cult, we were constantly watched by other people we called our “shepherds.” Now, for the first time, we were trying to be a family.
Halfway down the hill that led to the main road, Tamar lit up a bowl of pot. Even before discovering the quiz, we older kids had known something was off, and to cope we had taken to drinking alcohol, smoking pot, and hanging out with friends who took drugs we had never heard of.
School became our haven from the confusing realities of home, and every day after school Tamar and I made it a point to stay out for as long as we could.
After second period class, Tamar and I noticed a Thai girl named Diana. We eagerly made friends and let her know right away that we had grown up in Thailand. It was the only common ground we had and we wanted desperately to make a normal friend. However, we hadn’t had a conversation to decide what we would say if someone asked us about our past.
“So, why’d you guys grow up in Thailand?” Diana asked when we met up for lunch.
“Our dad was an English teacher,” Tamar said triumphantly, like she actually meant it.
“So, what does your dad do for a living now?” Diana asked.
Tamar looked at me. We both looked down at the concrete. There was an awkward silence, then a gurgle from Tamar’s throat.
“Well, our dad was an English teacher in Thailand,” she said. Sometimes we told people he was in the military. Both were half-truths since some of the adults in the cult did take up English- teaching jobs at military base camps to obtain visas and make some extra cash.
“Yeah, but what does he do now?” Diana persisted. Tamar’s face turned red. I felt my cheeks flush. I decided to keep quiet.
“Um, I don’t know,” Tamar said. “I’ll have to ask him.”
Diana gave us a long, hard look. She never met us for lunch after that.
I couldn’t acknowledge where I had come from or accept the fact that this moment was all there was. Growing up in the Children of God, an apocalyptic cult, I had been told that I was chosen, that the end was near, but now there was no end in sight – no utopia, no heaven to look forward to. And in this new life in California, I was far from chosen or special; I was an outcast. I didn’t fit in anywhere, and I needed nothing more than to be normal and cool.
America had held the promise of “cool” and glamour, of acceptance and happiness. But now, that too seemed to be slipping away. To cope with the this new “normal” that I so desperately wanted to escape, I’d get as drunk as I possibly could and turn my mind into a spinning cycle of forgetfulness, a carefree void.
I would sometimes come home from school drunk, shouting at Mom and Dad, “You raised us in a cult! How could you? I hate you! How dare you! I should’ve never been born! You should’ve never had any of us!” My parents responded with a reminder of how difficult life was for them now with Mom’s cancer treatment, Dad starting school from scratch, and limited financial income. Their response always made me feel guilty.
I played a game with myself in which I attempted to see how much I could drink and still maintain my sanity, even when the world around me started to spin. Since I had control over nothing else in my life growing up in a cult, at least I could control my wild drinking.
Drunken rages at Rowland Heights Park, located down the street from our high school, became an after-school routine. One day we were there with our new best friend Crayola, a wild girl who dressed in bright colors and pulled us into the girls’ room at school to share the bottles of liquor she always carried in the metal lunchbox that looked like a box of crayons (hence the name). Her boyfriend Thomas, who was older and hadn’t graduated because he had been expelled for being drunk on campus, was there, and the rest of their circle of friends. These kids skated in places they weren’t supposed to skate and tagged graffiti on the sides of freeway overpasses. Thomas retrieved a bottle of vodka from his backpack. We drank it straight. It felt like fire down my throat and made my ears burn. We drank it like it was medicine that would erase our childhood wounds with each desperate sip. We were walking away from the park when Thomas, drunk as usual, mentioned that he would have kissed me if he weren’t with Crayola. Hearing this, Crayola approached me from behind and hit me on the head with her lunch box. I fell to the ground, partly from the vodka, and she started yanking my hair by its roots, shouting, “You fucking bitch!”
Since she was much smaller than me, I pulled myself out of her grasp. Tamar and I walked home together, crying, to the sound of Crayola still yelling.
Everything was spinning when I got home. I felt like a failure. Triggered by the fight with Crayola and distraught over my family whom I could tell was far from normal, I recalled the stories of other kids who couldn’t cope after leaving the Children of God and attempted to take their own lives. I decided to look for a way to end it all.
I searched the house for anything that could cause death by ingestion – bleach, pills, a combination of cleaning products. I wanted it to be quick and painless, but I didn’t want to mangle my body. I found a nearly full bottle of aspirin in Mom’s cupboard. I decided that, on top of all the vodka I had drunk, it would do the trick nicely. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and headed off to my favorite hideout, tucked on a hill behind a farmhouse. There, before taking the pills, I found a sort of peace.
I had grown up in a world where I was prohibited from making decisions. But if there’s one freedom we have as humans, it’s the will to live or die. I recalled a scene from the 1993 version of “The Three Musketeers,” one of the first movies we watched after moving to the U.S. Milady de Winter is sentenced to beheading for treason. Moments before her execution, clad in a flowing white gown, she jumps off a rocky cliff to her death in the ocean below.
In the Children of God, we never talked about suicide, but the “End” was always on the horizon. When you’ve lived a life where death is an arm’s reach away, the prospect is enticing and feasible. Because I had thought of heaven so much as a child, I’d always felt connected to the afterlife in a way most people weren’t, almost like I belonged there instead of here. It wasn’t a way out; it was a way in. Life – even in all its magic and beauty – is a slow journey to death, so why not end it now? Why not meet the “light”?
Before heading to the hill, I had written Mom and Dad a suicide note. It said I was unable to handle the world. I was sorry and I loved them and would miss them. And I loved and would miss Tamar. I would miss her the most. But I didn’t want them to miss me. I would be fine. And Tamar would be fine. Death is just a journey and one that I’d prepared for my whole life.
I swallowed the pills in handfuls until the bottle was almost empty. I took the last pills one by one.
Once the sun had set I stumbled to my room and went to bed expecting, like I did most nights as a child, that I wouldn’t wake up. I prayed I would die in my sleep, painlessly, my body still intact.
I was awake all night, throwing up a poisonous combination of vodka and remnants of over-the-counter painkillers. Every time I looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t bear what I saw. How could I live with myself?
Tamar came into the bathroom, and I told her what I had done. She hugged me and said she sometimes thought about ending her life too.
I mustered up my best outfit, walked onto the school campus, and held my head high. As I headed to first-period science class, I resolved I was going to have to keep looking up. I was going to have to find a way – any way – to keep hope alive. Because if death doesn’t accept you when you knock at its door, I sure as hell didn’t know what would.
In class my stomach ached from the overdose of pills and my throat burned from the rancid taste of bile and vodka. But I couldn’t stop thinking, Why am I alive? Why am I here? A new life I never owned was slipping away from me, fading into an abyss. Even in my darkest hour, death wouldn’t take me. Now where was I to turn?
Mom and Dad found my suicide note and took me to lunch at Subway to talk about it. I had never been out alone with just my parents. There’s an embarrassment that comes with a failed attempt at suicide, and there’s no real way to explain it to anyone, much less to the people who gave you life. The day was grey and overcast.
“So, do you want to talk?” Dad said, unwrapping his sub. Dad looked different now. He wore khakis and a collared shirt. His appearance was more professional than in the cult when he and all the adult men mostly wore t-shirts and shorts as Father David ordered them not to be “worldly.” I sat across from them with my arms folded across my chest and didn’t say a word. I didn’t know how to address the topic with my parents.
“Flor, you know we love you, don’t you?” Mom said. She put her hand on mine. Her skin was rough and her fingers wrinkled. “We would never do anything to hurt you or any of your brothers and sisters,” she said.
“I know,” I said. I looked down at the pile of chips I had dumped on my napkin, but I wasn’t hungry. I knew it was much more complicated than love.
“And we tried our best,” Mom said. “We raised you the best way we knew how.”
“I know you did,” I said. “I know you love us. It’s just…” I looked away and felt hot tears welling up. I blinked them back and wiped my face with the cuff of my jacket. They would never understand.
“Is Tamar okay?” Mom asked. “Tamar’s fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. They never asked why I did it or addressed the suicide question directly, and as hard as I tried I couldn’t find the words to tell them. Nor did I bring up the topic of the Children of God. They would never understand the connection, if indeed there was one. It was an awkward lunch with lots of silence and unexplained tears over a dry tuna salad sandwich.
My parents were adults when they made the decision to join the Children of God. It had been their choice to bring their kids into the fold. But as the cult progressed and changed, the adults – not just the children – were abandoned and cheated and manipulated and lied to. Maybe my parents never wanted to be in a cult. Maybe, like me, they just couldn’t get out. They would never understand my experience, I reasoned. They were still figuring out theirs, and it would be years before I could begin to take control of my life and make sense of my own.
This story was adapted from Flor Edwards’s new book “Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times” from Turner Publishing, © 2018.
If you liked this piece, check out Flor’s first Narratively contribution, “My Childhood in an Apocalyptic Cult,” voted the site’s best story from our first 200 weeks by our editors.
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