I felt like we had stories about family loyalty; I didn't feel like we had stories about what to do when you felt that loyalty to your family was in conflict with loyalty to yourself.
Interpretation
The quote explores the tension between family loyalty and personal integrity.
Tara Westover's quote highlights the complex emotional struggle individuals often face when their loyalty to family conflicts with their own personal beliefs and values. It suggests that while stories of familial loyalty are plentiful, there is a lack of narratives addressing how one navigates the challenging situation when family expectations clash with self-identity or personal ethics.
In practice
During a family gathering, someone could use this quote to discuss the challenges of family loyalty.
I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.
We think love is noble, and in some ways, it is. But in some ways, it isn't. Love is just love. And sometimes people do terrible things because of it.
I was 17 the first time I set foot in a classroom, but 10 years later, I would graduate from Cambridge with a Ph.D. 'Educated' is the story of how I came by my education. It is also the story of how I lost my family.
I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.
Although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. I could stand with my family or with the gentiles... but there was no foothold in between.
We think about education as a stepping stone into a higher socio-economic class, into a better job. And it does do those things. But I don't think that's what it really is. I experienced it as getting access to different ideas and perspectives and using them to construct my own mind.
It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?
I'm one of those people, since I was 5, I could tell you I was going to have kids. I could tell you I was going to have three. I could tell you they were going to be girls. But I have never wanted to get married. I never played bride. I was never interested. I don't know what it is; I never wanted to get married.
I always supported the women I worked with having time off to go to parent-teacher conferences and doctors' appointments or bringing their infants into the office.
And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.
When once married people begin to attack me with, 'Oh! you will think very differently, when you are married,' I can only say, 'No I shall not'; and then they say again, 'Yes you will,' and there is an end to it.
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