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Midwife
When Tara is young her mother becomes a midwife. She does not like it, but because of the family´s religious beliefs she feels like she has to become one. This is mainly because her family does not believe in doctors and hospitals, but herbs and natural medicine. In addition Tara´s father thinks that she has to be a midwife so that they have enough midwives for the End of Days. After a while her mother delivers more and more babies and becomes better at it. -
Tyler goes to college
A month after the accident Tara´s brother Tyler tells their father that he wants to go to college. At this age Tara does not even know what college is as the only school she is going through is homeschooling teached poorly by her mother. Tyler is unlike his brothers very calm and silent and he and Tara has a good relationship so when he leaves it affects Tara. -
Car accident
When Tara is ten, her family gets in a car accident. Her mother gets serious injured and has to spend months laying in the cellar. Her mother has swellings around here eyes so big that they terrify Tara. For weeks her mother does not even remember Tara´s name and even though she has serious injuries her father refuses her to go to a hospital, because he thinks her faith is in Gods hands. This leads to a possible brain injury and lots of migraines the following weeks. -
Luke´s accident
One day in the summer while Tara was taking the dishes and Luke, her brother was working in the junkyard, Luke gets his leg set on fire. Tara sees Luke running down the hill with his leg on fire while he is setting the grass behind him on fire as he runs down the hill. As a ten year old she does not know what to do, but she puts his leg in a dirty trash can. When her mom comes home they treat him with herbs, but as in the other accident he does not get sent to a hospital. -
Tara´s accident
Tara starts helping her father more and more in the junkyard. At the same time she starts getting interested in school. After she is done working in the junkyard she tries to learn science and math. One day she has an accident when she is working in the junkyard. A piece of metal digs into her leg and she gets treated by her mother. -
The second accident
The family goes on another trip to Arizona because of Tara´s dad´s depression. After a fight the family decides to drive home in the middle of a storm and this ends in another accident. Some days after the accident Tara wakes up without being able to move her neck. Shawn, her brother comes home and breaks it, so she is able to move it and they starts to form a sibling relationship -
The first violence from Shawn
Tara and Shawn starts getting a good relationship and spends a lot of time together, but at the same time Shawn starts getting more controlling above a girl he likes. One day when Shawn asks Tara to fetch him a glass of water she dumps the water on his head and he gets angry. It ends with him grabbing a handful of her hair and dragging her to the toilet and dropping her head in the toilet and then folding her wrists till she finally apologizes. -
Shawn´s accident
While Shawn and some other of Tara´s brothers are working to build som industrial granaries in the city Shawn gets exposed to a big accident. Shawn stood on a forklift and fell down and hit his head in a metal plate. The next days he struggles with tings like going to the bathroom and Tara reflects. After this accident Shawn´s personality changes, but Tara reflects upon if he always has been cruel or if it got worse after the accident. -
Tara leaves for college
After hours of self studying besides working both at a gas station and also for her father Tara finally decides to take the ACT, a test homeschoolers have to take to get into college. She takes it twice, but ends up with a good enough result the second time. At the age of sixteen she moves out to an apartment in Utah. She feels alone and misses her family, that she worked hard to get away from. -
More violence from Shawn
When Tara gets home for Thanksgiving she brings her friend Charles to dinner with her family. During this dinner she gets exposed to more violence from Shawn and this time in front of Charles. This makes her embarrassed. Another day while she is home she also gets exposed for violence from him in the parking lot. She keeps underestimating how serious it is and tells herself that it is only "fun". -
Money starts freeing Tara
Tara starts opening up about her past to a bishop. He even offers her money so she does not need to depend on her family, but she does not take it. After a while she really is in a big need of money and the bishop tells her about a federal grant. The money is from the government, so she does not want it. After some months she takes the grant, because she is broke and uses all her time worrying about money. This starts freeing her from her family. -
Bipolar disorder and avoidance of her father
Tara learns about bipolar disease in class and understands that this might be something her dad has. Even though she learns that it is something you can not control she gets angry at her dad for having to pay for his cruelty and paranoia and cuts him off after a fight between them. She starts living outside of her father's rules and even goes to the hospital when she gets sick. -
Cambridge
Tara gets into Cambridge with help from her professor and she is beginning to learn how to take help from others. With some help from her aunt she gets a passport and moves to England. At Cambridge she feels like she does not deserve to be there. Even though lots of professors are impressed by her work and tells her that she belongs there as much as anyone else, she still does not feel like she belongs. This probably has roots in the violence she has experienced. -
A new start?
After Tara has been home for a while and visited her sister, Audrey she goes back to Cambridge where she becomes a full time student. She is starting to live a better life and fit in with the others. But one day she gets an email from Audrey where she says that she has also experienced violence from Shawn and she apologizes for not protecting her. So does her mother, who even has talked to their dad. She promises that from now on things will change and Tara feels like their story changes. -
The cost of an education
Shawn finds out that Tara has told their parents about his actions and he threatens to kill her. When she tells her parents this, they do not believe her. They tell her that her memory can not be trusted and that her anger is dangerous. Shawn cuts her out of his life and even Audrey says that she has forgiven Shawn, but that Tara is dangerous and she has to cut her out of her life. Tara is starting to lose her family and understands what her education has cost her. -
Betrayal
When Tara is home to tell about the abuse from Shawn her father does not believe her and her mother does not say a word. At the end of her father's lecture he blames the women in the family for not knowing how to behave around men. Tara realizes that her mother lied to her and that she never confronted her dad and her dad never confronted Shawn. No one had ever promised to help Tara and Audrey. -
One last try
Tara gets into Harvard and her parents visit her. They try to reconvert her, but fails and after this they cut contact for a while. She gives her family one last try as she flies home for Christmas. When she comes home she meets her mother who is happy to see her, but after realizing that her home only traps and confuses her, she leaves. She also speaks to Tyler who says that he believes Tara and not the rest of their family, but she is still afraid that he will betray her. -
A new start
Tara gets help from her brother Tyler and his wife Stephanie. They tell her that they support her and that they condemn mother and dad for their abuse. With support from Tyler she starts studying after being depressed for a while and she earns a PhD and lives a happy life with her boyfriend Drew in London. Although she is happy she feels like she has to reclaim some of her family´s shared history. -
Collecting the last pieces
As Tara comes home to Idaho to participate in her grandmas funeral she visits her aunt who also has been cut of the family. At he funeral she has not seen her parents or most of her siblings in years. She sits with her aunt and Tyler. She looks at Richard who has apologized to her, Audrey who still does not support her and Shawn who does not look at her. She notices that she, Richard and Tyler who are educated split out from the rest. -
Educated
Tara has now not seen her parents in years and she only has contact with Tony, Tyler, Richard and her aunts and she does not know if she will ever find her way back to the mountain. She says that she had to separate herself from her father to love him and concludes that her way to be educated has been difficult and painful. She also understands that education does not only happen in school, it is a lifelong process.