I like to imagine my mother before I knew her–before she became a mom for the first time to my big sister and wife to my father. I like to imagine her long straight hair, jeans that hugged her ballerina legs, her high heels clicking along the pavement on her way to a job she was good at, her tan skin on elegant arms that opened out wide to the world.

Because it was those open arms that brought me into my world. A world with gravel roads, cattle grazing in the yard against the backdrop of clay buttes. One I’m certain she never pictured herself in.

I like to imagine her this way, young and in love and willing to sacrifice the life between city streets, the life she was familiar with, for a man in a band with wild, black hair wearing a suit with cowboy boots and looking displaced in that city where they met–ready to bust out at the polyester seams, saddle his horse and ride out on the interstate toward home.

I like to imagine him, my father before he was my father, enamored by a woman with quiet confidence and an aversion to practical shoes. A woman who was fine on her own raising her daughter, but might be convinced, if treated with the kindness and respect that she deserved, to go with him to live in a place that require more practical shoes.

I like to picture that she pulled on her boots and listened to her new husband’s dreams of cattle and horses while she searched for work, taught dance classes in the nearby small town, had two more daughters and watched us grow and get our hands dirty and tangle our fuzzy hair in the wind. She cheered us on at small town rodeos, tended to broken arms, made makeshift habitats for pet turtles in her roasting pan, gave advice on cheerleading moves, helped with 4-H projects and bought us pretty shoes, no matter the dirt and mud we drug into the house on our boots.

And while she drove one daughter with ballerina aspirations to dance lessons 75 miles away, sent one to ride horses and sing her songs on stage and scheduled the other for basketball and volleyball camps around the state, I imagine her grabbing little pieces of her heart and handing them quietly off to her daughters…

Her pointed toes, blue eyes and beauty she slipped to her oldest in her mug filled with hot chocolate on her way out the door.

Her honesty, determination, quick wit, strength and social graces that exist within my mother flew out of her mouth and attached to her youngest daughter during an argument about boyfriends or clothes or parties with friends.

And to me, her middle daughter, the one who has been so convinced that I had nothing in common with her, she gave a gift of encouragement, belief in dreams and understanding of big emotions. But most of all her sacrifice and acceptance of a world she had to grow to understand and appreciate has been her greatest gift to me because it became my home on a landscape I will always belong to.

But for all that she’s given, through snakes and skunks making their way into her house, through thankless jobs, burned tuna casseroles, drought and dust storms, drained bank accounts and late nights waiting up and worrying, my mother has held on to the best parts of herself:

The beauty queen parts, the graceful selfless parts. The life of the party, the giver of the most thoughtful gifts. The big sister, the caring daughter, the understanding wife parts. The organized and impeccably clean and always prepared (even when 30 miles away from the nearest grocery store) parts.

The parts of her that have always known what is best for her family. 

So, yes, I like to imagine my mother before I knew her, before she was my mother. I like to imagine her with all that love to give, all that joy and all those dreams and talents with the world at her delicate fingertips.

Because of all the things and people she could have belonged to, all of the places she could have laid her heart down, she chose to lay it here.

She chose us and for that we are the luckiest.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and moms everywhere.