Educated: Prologue–Chapter 3

“Do you have calendula?” the midwife said.

I retrieved the tincture, and my mother packed it in a plastic grocery bag with the dried herbs.

She explained every remedy and palliative.

She was a grown woman with seven children, but this was the first time in her life that she was, without question or caveat, the one in charge.

Sometimes, in the days after a birth, I detected in her something of Judy’s heavy presence, in a forceful turn of her head, or the imperious arch of an eyebrow.

“I thought you wanted a phone,” Mother said, her eyes so full of surprise they were irreproachable.

Mother’s being a midwife would subvert the Medical Establishment, but in order to be a midwife she needed a phone.

She’s grasping for humor but the memory is jaundiced.

His lips were often pressed together in a jocular grin, as if all the world were his to laugh at.

Still, the way Mother tells it, back then Dad was bursting with energy, laughter and panache.

I know she had the ring before Dad served a mission—which was expected of all faithful Mormon men—and spent two years proselytizing in Florida.

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.

It was constant, the only eternal thing, inscrutable, detached, dispassionate.

It was constant, the only eternal thing, inscrutable, detached, dispassionate.

How the paranoia and fundamentalism were carving up my life, how they were taking from me the people I cared about and leaving only degrees and certificates—an air of respectability—in their place.