This thesis is a narrative inquiry of my mother’s lived experiences before she became a teacher in a one-room school house in 1930s Saskatchewan. There have been numerous memoirs written by teachers of rural schools. After reading a wide assortment of these memoirs I noticed that they were mostly of classroom experiences. There is a dearth of information about the lived experiences of these teachers, many of whom were women, prior to their actual classroom teaching. With my mother as a co-inquirer, we narratively explored her lived experiences in her journey into the story of becoming a teacher. Narrative research lends itself to this type of study: the telling of a particular aspect of my mother’s story, mostly in her words. The thesis became highly intertextual as the participant, my mother, and the researcher read and studied teacher memoirs, local histories, histories and narrative artifacts together, using these to co-create this narrative inquiry. Semi-structured and structured interviews were used to collect data. I drew on feminist theory to re-read, and to re-know my mother’s familiar stories. Together we read Gloria Mehlman’s (2008) memoir Gifted to Learn which served as a counterpoint to my mother’s story. Although not an exact parallel to my mother’s story, our shared reading elevated our narrative inquiry by providing a contrast between the two women educators’ experiences and creating an opportunity for rich conversations between my mother and me during her last days. This narrative inquiry can be used to satisfy the breach in stories about this particular era of the history of educators.