Educated

by Tara Westover

Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse.*

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical.

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

Grandma thought we should be in school and not, as she put it, “roaming the mountain like savages.”