January: Poverty Awareness Month
Book Club Reading:
Educated by Tara Westover
Personal Reflections by Ruth Lindner-Merkley
Educated by Tara Westover was the book that was chosen by popular vote for the month of January for our Diversity and Inclusion Book Club. The theme for January was Poverty Awareness. While this memoir does touch on poverty and how it can affect social outlooks, it is not necessarily the primary theme of the book. Educated covers issues of formal education vs. folk education; religion vs. fundamentalism; mental health; physical and mental abuse; and so many more.
For myself, I was raised in a Mormon household. My parents were both converts to the church; they converted before they were married and five years before I was born. I was their first child. I have three younger siblings, and each and every one of us was blessed and baptized in the church. Myself and my sister were both married in the temple. However, my upbringing within the church was vastly different from Tara’s. Many of the ideas and experiences she had were what were referred to as those “crazy Utah Mormons” when I was growing up. I was brought up with a dichotomous view of the church. There were us and there were the “Utah Mormon.” Tara may have been from Idaho, but a “Utah Mormon” did not necessarily originate from Utah. Their ideas were just more rigid, more fundamental. However, in reading Educated, it really shows you that faith and religion are not always black and white. There is not a dichotomy within the Mormon faith, there are so many shades within. As such, it made me reflect on how we are raised within a family. How our parents' ideas become our own, and that the path to our own ideas is not always an easy one. It's also not something that everyone achieves. There are many who live a life of generational thought. Their parents' ideas and beliefs are their own, going back generations. How do we step out of this generational thought? How does one determine what is their own idea as to the one they were raised to believe in?
As for now, only my youngest sister is still active in the church. For myself, I formally left right before my oldest child would have been baptized. There are many reasons for why we chose, as a family, to leave the Mormon faith. We have never sought another. Nor are we interested in following organized religion in any manner. Finding my own path meant leaving that part of my life behind me. However, it is something that will always be there. It's a stamp on me that I still struggle with. There are things I was taught growing up that have inherently shaped who I am and what I have done with my life. I forge my own path, but it is still a struggle. A struggle between who I am, who I want to be, and who I was.
As to the primary theme for January, and the discussion of poverty: in all honesty, I did not feel like this was a primary theme for this book. While her family seems to definitely live below the poverty line, at least while she is young, it is not money that defines the boundaries of their lives. They have a roof over their head, electricity, plumbing, food on the table, and I never felt like there was ever a great concern within Tara’s life of not having enough to survive. While she did struggle with paying for school, she was able to do it, especially once she got over her aversion to government assistance. The poverty in her life is not primarily financial. I felt more that her life was defined by a poverty of understanding and freedom of thought. Most of her family never saw a need to understand her, to allow her to be herself, and to truly love WHO she was. Their love, their attention was only given so long as she towed the line of their thoughts. Her desire to seek education allowed her to finally be free to think for herself, to find that path that was her own, to embrace herself as worthwhile.
Honestly, I could go on and on when it comes to this book. I am very thankful it was chosen, even if it didn’t align with the theme as much as I had hoped. I related to it. I felt her pain, her journey, acutely. It’s a book that will stick with me for a very long time.
The link below are some discussion questions which were collected and adapted from several resources. They are provided here only to assist you, if you wish, in your reflections. I hope you find them helpful.
