The cats of Caturday morning enjoying the sun outside were such cute kittens once! Alas, they cannot read.

"I didn't ask to go on the next birth. Mother returned home pale and shaking. Her voice quivered as she told me and my sister the story: how the unborn baby's heart rate had dropped dangerously low, to a mere tremor; how she'd called an ambulance, then decided they couldn't wait and taken the mother in her own car. She'd driven at such speed that by the time she made it to the hospital, she'd acquired a police escort. In the ER, she'd tried to give the doctors the information they needed without seeming too knowledgeable, without making them suspect that she was an unlicensed midwife.

An emergency cesarean was performed. The mother and baby remained in the hospital for several days, and by the time they were released Mother had stopped trembling. In fact, she seemed exhilarated and had begun to tell the story differently, relishing the moment she's been pulled over by the policeman, who was surprised to find a moaning woman, obviously in labor, in the backseat. 'I slipped into the scatter-brained woman routine,' she told me and Audrey, her voice growing louder, catching hold. 'Men like to think they're saving some brain-dead woman who's got herself into a scrape. All I had to do was step aside and let him play the hero!'

The most dangerous moment for Mother had come minutes later, in the hospital, after the woman had been wheeled away. A doctor stopped Mother and asked why she's been at the birth in the first place. She smiled at the memory. 'I asked him the dumbest questions I could think of.' She put on a very high, coquettish voice very unlike her own. 'Oh! Was that the baby's head? Aren't babies supposed to come out feet-first?' The doctor was persuaded that she couldn't possibly be a midwife.

There were no herbalists in Wyoming as good as Mother, so a few months after the incident in the hospital, Judy came to Buck's Peak to restock. The two women chatted in the kitchen, Judy perched on a barstool, Mother leaning across the counter, her head resting lazily in her hand. I took the list of herbs to the storeroom. Maria, lugging a different baby, followed. I pulled dried leaves and clouded liquids from the shelves, all the while gushing about Mother's exploits, finishing with the confrontation in the hospital. Maria had her own stories about dodging Feds, but when she began to tell one I interrupted her.

'Judy is a fine midwife,' I said, my chest rising. 'But when it comes to doctors and cops, nobody plays stupid like my mother.'"

~ Tara Westover, Educated (22-23)

Bibliomania | "Inspiring and dark, ‘Educated’ is so raw it bleeds"

https://www.breezejmu.org/culture/bibliomania-inspiring-and-dark-educated-is-so-raw-it-bleeds/article_ba0ba262-b323-11ee-bd0b-f7bf9dedb413.html