Educated

by Tara Westover

I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.

I am VERY curious how these parents think this is okay.

We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse.*

Anti vaxxers too then I take it.

The baby doesn’t make sense—I’m the youngest of my mother’s seven children—but like I said, none of this happened.

will her common sense snap her out of this brainwashed upbringing?

The next morning Dad purged our fridge of milk, yogurt and cheese, and that evening when he came home, his truck was loaded with fifty gallons of honey.

There is no rationalizing with people like this.

Dad said public school was a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God. “I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself,” he said, “as send them down the road to that school.”

If grandma believes in school, then surely father went himself???

“Your dad can’t make me do a damned thing.” Grandma stood, squaring herself. “If he wants you, he’ll have to come get you.”

I love her already.

“Randy Weaver’s been shot,” Dad said, his voice thin and erratic. “He left the cabin to fetch his son’s body, and the Feds shot him.”

This can't be true. Hes insane.

Mother didn’t want to be a midwife. Midwifery had been Dad’s idea, one of his schemes for self-reliance.

Seems things tend to go his way.

Mother called the church headquarters in Salt Lake City.

Latter day saints? Yeesh

There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.

I knew people could go crazy—they’d wear dead cats on their heads or fall in love with a turnip—but the notion that a person could be functional, lucid, persuasive, and something could still be wrong, had never occurred to me.

What was happening now had happened before. This was the second severing of mother and daughter. The tape was playing in a loop.

Generational trauma but also family history repeats itself.

Dad, his fervor kindled, would drone for an hour or more, reciting the same lines over and over, fueled by some internal passion that burned long after the rest of us had been lectured into a cold stupor.

Makes sense he would have a manic episode following a depression.

We had no idea it was a medical term. Raccoon eyes. A sign of serious brain injury.

Disgusting to be married to such an irresponsible man.

all the decisions that go into making a life—the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.

I tried to remember not to shout. I tried to avoid fights with Richard, especially the kind that ended with the two of us rolling on the floor, him pulling my hair, me dragging my fingernails through the softness of his face.

Is this how godly children behave? Get over yourselves.

scrambled onto its roof just in time to see Tyler close his trunk and turn in a circle, as if he wanted to say goodbye but there was no one to say goodbye to.

This makes me want to cry.

Then she would pick up a bottle of oil, press it to her chest and, with her eyes closed, say, “Do I need this?” If her body swayed forward it meant yes, the oil would help her headache. If her body swayed backward it meant no, and she would test something else.

The most wack psuedo-science there is. No wonder the essential oil convention is huge in salt lake.

When Dad saw me with one of those books, he’d try to get me away from them.

Ive never known someone to be so threatened by education.

The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

didn’t understand. He wanted to dump the bin with me in it? “I’ll climb up after you’ve dumped the load,” I said. “No, this’ll be faster,” Dad said.

He is an idiot.

This was another of Mother’s recipes. I’d taken it after I’d fallen from the scrap bin, to dull the throbbing in my leg while I waited for the gash to close, but as near as I could tell it had no effect.

The amount of suffering this family has endured at the hands of psuedoscience :(

He said there’d be trouble if the Government found out about Luke’s leg, that the Feds would take us kids away.

Where does he get "the feds" from - sounds straight out of that 70s show. If he means CPS, then yes he should be very worriked o ver all the harm he's created.

“A man ought to have a real belt,” Dad said at breakfast on the day Luke was well enough to return to the junkyard, handing him a leather strap with a steel buckle.

HOW IS LUKE GOING BACK TO WORK FOR HIS NEGLIGENT ASSHOLE FATHER?!?!

Luke had run through the weeds and set the mountain afire. You remember that summer. Dry, scorching. You can’t go starting forest fires in farm country during a dry summer. So Dad put Luke in the truck and told him to drive to the house, to Mother. Only Mother was gone. Right.

I still dont know if this sounds accurate either.

His account differs from both mine and Richard’s. In Luke’s memory, Dad took Luke to the house, administered a homeopathic for shock, then put him in a tub of cold water, where he left him to go fight the fire. This goes against my memory, and against Richard’s. Still, perhaps our memories are in error.

Memory fascinates me. How people can experience the exact same moment and recall it differently.

how they were from Monterey or Seattle or wherever and thought they could impose West Coast socialism on the good people of Idaho.

LOL i bet they still think this. I can imagine they hate californians the most.

I wasn’t paid much, but as I’d never been paid anything before, it felt like a lot.

Thats how i felt with my first few jobs.

“Keep those in your room,” Mother said as we left the store. She didn’t need to say anything else. I already understood that I should not show the leotard to Dad.

It's funny how every family has their own secret coded language to convey what is/isn't allowed.

I stared at the gray hairs on the back of Dad’s head. He was sitting quietly, listening to Mother, who continued to insult Caroline, to say how shocking the costumes were, how obscene. Dad nodded as we bumped up the icy driveway, becoming less angry with every word from Mother.

Bigots only quiet down when they hear affirmative words from other bigots.

reality had never yielded to my thoughts before.

Dad smiled at everyone. There was scarcely a person in the church that Dad hadn’t called a gentile—for visiting a doctor or for sending their kids to the public school—but that day he seemed to forget about California socialism and the Illuminati.

Thats the thing. They only weaponize religion when it works for them.

I could barely hear Dad’s reply when I asked what the gun was for. “Defense,” he said. The next night I had a rehearsal at Worm Creek.

Nothing like guns and community theater.

“After what happened last time?” she shouts. “You’re going to drive through the night again? What about the storm?” Dad says we’ll beat the storm.

His level of confidence sounds like a narcissist too.

We listened to the radio while the cops asked Dad why the van wasn’t insured, and why he’d removed the seats and seatbelts.

Because insurance is just a ploy for the government to steal your data, and lack of seatbelts im SURE was gods will. Fucking EYEROLL. Jail. All of them.

hear a step behind me and feel thick, callused hands wrap around my skull. Before I can react, he jerks my head with a swift, savage motion. CRACK! It’s so loud, I’m sure my head has come off and he’s holding it. My body folds, I collapse. Everything is black but somehow spinning. When I open my eyes moments later, his hands are under my arms and he’s holding me upright. “Might be a while before you can stand,” he says. “But when you can, I need to do the other side.”

How i felt after my first chiro appointment.

That person was Shawn, and I was looking at him but I wasn’t seeing him. I don’t know what I saw—what creature I conjured from that violent, compassionate act—but I think it was my father, or perhaps my father as I wished he were, some longed-for defender, some fanciful champion, one who wouldn’t fling me into a storm, and who, if I was hurt, would make me whole.

These children have grown up knowing only harm and no protection. Makes sense.

I would help Grandpa round up a dozen or so to take to the auction in town, where they’d be sold for slaughter.

Who ate horse meat back then?!?

joked and teased, and he sometimes gave me advice, which was mostly “Don’t do what I did.”

Seems pretty common advice.

Shawn’s undergoing this painful and expensive procedure is the reason my parents would take me to an orthodontist to correct the same defect, which was genetic. In short, because Shawn lost his canines, I was able to keep mine.

Only believing in medicine when it benefits them, got it.

Sometimes I could scarcely move through a room, I was so preoccupied with not walking or bending or crouching like them. But no one had ever taught me the modest way to bend over, so I knew I was probably doing it the bad way.

BECAUSE THERE IS NO MODEST WAY.

There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe. That was good. It meant I was close to passing out. I was looking forward to it.

This family is so fucked up.

“There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.”

How i feel once i realized my views differed from dad's.

“I’ve decided not to go to BYU,” I said. She looked up, fixing her eyes on the wall behind me, and whispered, “Don’t say that. I don’t want to hear that.” I didn’t understand. I’d thought she would be glad to see me yield to God. Her gaze shifted to me. I hadn’t felt its strength in years and I was stunned by it. “Of all my children,” she said, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze. I didn’t expect it from Tyler—that was a surprise—but you. Don’t you stay. Go. Don’t let anything stop you from going.”

“You’re as smart as Dad. If Dad’s right, you’ll know when you get there.”

Why do they think their dad is smart?!?

Mother hugged me. Dad tried to be cheerful. “It proves one thing at least,” he said. “Our home school is as good as any public education.”

HORSE SHIT. The gall of egotistical religious ppl to take ownership of someone else's success is insane.

Then, without any explanation, as if the connection between the two were obvious, I wrote, I don’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to get a decent education as a child.

The brainwashing stops when you're removed from the source.

“Not great,” I said instead. “I had no idea it would be this hard.” The line was silent, and I imagined Dad’s stern face hardening. I waited for the jab I imagined he was preparing, but instead a quiet voice said, “It’ll be okay, honey.” “It won’t,” I said. “There will be no scholarship. I’m not even going to pass.” My voice was shaky now. “If there’s no scholarship, there’s no scholarship,” he said. “Maybe I can help with the money. We’ll figure it out. Just be happy, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Come on home if you need.”

Wow. Not what i was expecting. A lot more love than i thought.

I had read that slaves in colonial times were happier and more free than their masters, because the masters were burdened with the cost of their care.

The white man's burden.

I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.