Educated: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

The next spring, Tara helps her mother weigh and bottle tinctures and herbs to give to a local midwife—who is unlicensed by any formal agency but wants to take Mother on as an assistant. The midwife makes several more visits to the Westover home and leaves each time with her arms full of herbal cures. One time, she brings her daughter Maria—a girl about Tara’s age who also doesn’t attend school, and who tells Tara stories about the births she’s witnessed.

The first time Mother assists with a birth, she is gone from the house for two days. She comes back looking tired and drawn and describes the difficult birth as “awful.” Dad assures her that she has been called by the Lord to do this difficult work. Tara reveals that Mother’s apprenticeship in midwifery had been Dad’s idea—“one of his schemes for self-reliance.” He wanted for her to learn how to bring babies into the world so that in the “End of Days,” she’d be able to deliver babies.

The next birth is easier, and as the months go by and spring and summer turn to fall, Mother assists with dozens and dozens of births. The following spring, Mother tells Tara’s father that she’s at last prepared to deliver a baby on her own—but Dad insists she actually deliver a baby by herself in order to prove her skills. Though Mother doesn’t think anyone would hire her when they could hire a more experienced midwife, soon the house is overrun with pregnant women practically “begging” Faye to deliver their babies for them. Midwives are scarce because even though midwifery is not illegal in the state of Idaho, it is not sanctioned, and midwives could face criminal charges if anything goes “very wrong” during the birth.

Mother begins delivering babies on her own and becomes so popular that she even hires an assistant. She begins instructing Audrey and Tara in herbal remedies and palliatives, and Tara enjoys seeing her mother feel joy at finally being in charge of something. Mother charges about five hundred dollars per birth and soon has a steady income of her own, which supplements the meager funds Dad earns through the scrap yard and odd construction jobs. When Mother pays to have a phone installed, Dad balks at the new technology first but then relents, recognizing that it’s essential for her business.

When Tara’s older brother Luke turns fifteen, he asks Mother for a birth certificate. He wants to enroll in Driver’s Ed so that he can learn to drive and eventually pilot rigs like one of his elder brothers, Tony, who makes “good money” hauling gravel. Tony, one of the elder Westover children, has a birth certificate and a license. Mother begins filing paperwork on Luke’s behalf, and though Dad doesn’t like the idea of relying on the government or giving them any information about his family, he relents when he realizes that Luke’s ability to drive is, much like a telephone, a necessity.

Mother decides to get birth certificates for Audrey, Tara, and their brother Richard, too. She has trouble finding records of the dates when any of them were born, however, and no one can agree on the date of Tara’s birth. Mother decides to say that Tara’s birthday is the twenty-seventh of September—an arbitrary date—and persuades Grandma-down-the-hill to sign an affidavit confirming the date.

That fall, Tara is nine years old, and accompanies Mother to witness her first birth. Tara has been brought along so that she can tend to the pregnant woman’s several small children during the labor and delivery. On the drive over, Mother goes over the protocol for what to do if something goes wrong and the Feds come to the house—she warns Tara to “under no circumstances” tell anyone official that her mother is a midwife. As Tara watches her terrified mother drive, she realizes at last just how much is at stake, and how much could go wrong, at every single birth over which Mother presides.

Weeks later, after a birth goes wrong and Mother is forced to drive the laboring woman to the hospital, she relays the story of how she managed to convince both a police officer who pulled her over on the way, and a doctor who questioned her at the hospital, that she was simply a friend of the pregnant woman who knew nothing about births. Listening to the story—and repeating it to her friend Maria later—Tara feels proud of her mother for being both a “fine midwife” and a master when it comes to deceiving “doctors and cops.”