It all started on my younger brother Joseph’s 18th Birthday. At the time, there was no way of knowing it was the start of anything, but in retrospect, it is clear that is when it started. But I guess I need to go back a little bit farther for that to make any sense.
My name is Anna Thrush and I grew up under very strange circumstances. Since before I was born (and I was 20 at the time this story unfolds), my parents had been members of a strange religious cult. Now, at the time I had no idea that we were the members of a strange religious cult. When you are born into something, it just seems normal. It was only later in life that I realized how different it was for the rest of the world.
I guess I can’t just skip ahead; you need to understand some of the ways in which my community was so strange. We called ourselves “The Light and The Way,” and we were ostensibly Christian. We read the Bible and celebrated Christmas and all that (although our Christmas was much more subdued than the strange carnival that you ‘regular’ Christians call Christmas).
Anyway, what really sets us apart from other Christians isn’t so much about the Bible or anything like that. I mean, the church leaders SAID that all of the rules were in the Bible, but I’ve never seen any evidence that that is true. No, what really set us apart was the strict way in which we live our lives, especially women.
For a woman, from the time you are born until you are married you are supposed to stay in your parents’ home or on their property at all times. In fact, every person in our community has big privacy hedges around the outside of their property to prevent people from outside of the Light and the Way from seeing women. Now that seems so strange, but growing up that was just the way life was. My parents owned about 25 acres of land in a secluded area in Idaho. And I stayed on that property.
Despite our seclusion, both women and men were encouraged to dress modestly. Every day I wore a big, billowy dress that went down to the floor and a bonnet. Both had very dull colors. I wore no makeup and had only one pair of shoes.I later learned later that I would be considered an attractive girl. At that age I was around 5’2 and 115lbs, but I had no idea what that meant in relation to other people. I had medium-sized breasts (although I didn’t know that either) and flared hips. My hair was very long and chestnut in color and my eyes were green. For what it is worth, men wore long black pants and long-sleeved white shirts every day. My brother was taller than me, around 5’9 and stocky in build. He had a square chin, short cropped brown hair, and blue eyes.
In addition to our simplicity of dress and modesty about appearance, we were fanatical about personal hygiene. We brushed our teeth three times a day, we shampooed our hair every other day, and showered every day. For religious fanatics, that is pretty good. From the time I was a little girl I was encouraged to wear deodorant and my mother told me from the time I first got my period that I was required to wax off all of the hair below my head once a week. Apparently, one of the prophets of our religion had taken the homely saying “cleanliness is godliness” to be a literal truth and our church had continued that tradition thereafter. I would later learn that rule only applied to women.
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