Where was your mother born?

My mom's name is Norma, but everyone calls her Jeannie. She was born in Phoenix, Arizona March 14, 1943 to a rodeo cowboy and his wife. Mom was the oldest of six children, five of whom still survive, and was named after her father, Norman. She was raised on the dairy farm in Tolleson, Arizona my grandparents bought with money scraped and saved from my grandfather's rodeo days.

She used to tell me stories of growing up on the farm. It seemed to me there were nothing but chores in her stories: feeding cows, milking cows, feeding calves, branding calves, castrating bulls, feeding chickens, plucking chickens, feeding horses, breaking horses, training horses, tilling fields, planting crops, harvesting crops, and on, and on, and on. Somewhere between all the work a farm requires, there were also stories of waterholes for swimming, playing in the sun, eating Sunday dinner, and arguing with siblings. I always pictured her as a sort of character from Huckleberry Finn with skinned knees, dirty face, and hand-sewn hand-me-down clothes.

My aunts and uncles speak of my mom as the sensitive child, always needy and always complaining. This seems completely appropriate to me, as Mom is still all of those things to differing degrees. Mom was a lovely young woman, shapely and leggy, dark hair, blue eyes, and pale, lightly freckled skin. I can't bear to think about the type of guy she might have dated in high school or the kind of high-maintenance girlfriend I can only assume she was. She has a confident air about her, but she rarely makes decisions on her own and refuses to take responsibility for her own actions. This is not to say she isn't a good person, she just strikes me as a woman who relied too long on her looks to get through her life. In fact, she is a very loving, considerate person; she just has misguided values.

Mom helped to raise her siblings, the youngest of which are only a few years older than my own sisters. She has mothering in her bones and teaching in her blood. She was a homemaker for most of her life. Having married a pastor, she dedicated herself to raising her children to be perfect doll-like creatures, who were as charming and delightful as she pretended to be. It wasn't until much later, the early 1980s in fact, that she took herself to college and earned a teaching degree. And why wouldn't she do just that? Every female in her line, for as long as is documented, have been nurses or teachers, including all three of her sisters.