Who Is Ted Cruz's Mom?

At a campaign stop in Madison, Wisconsin, Wednesday, Ted Cruz trotted out the ladies in his life to celebrate women. Former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina joined Cruz's wife, Heidi, and the woman who gave birth to him in Canada to talk about why Cruz is the best choice for women voters. But who is Ted Cruz's mom, Eleanor Darragh? The 81-year-old rarely makes public appearances, but took this opportunity to speak about her son, who called her his "best friend [for his] entire life." Awwwwwwwwwww.

Although she's joined him on the trail before, including the Texas Super Tuesday rally where Cruz celebrated a win, Eleanor Darragh, who is divorced from Ted's father, doesn't often speak out about her son. Cruz noted that the campaign event on Wednesday was the first time that his mother had done such an event, and she took the opportunity to remind potential voters that her son has always been a nerd.

"When he was studying the Constitution, he would spend hours in front of myself and his father reciting it and learning the gestures that went with it," Eleanor Darragh said about high school Ted. It's sweet, though! At the event, Heidi Cruz noted that her husband stood by his mother when she had breast cancer, a fact that he doesn't often trot out.

This marks the first time that Darragh has been in the news during this election cycle, or at least for something that she did on the trail. Her name popped up initially when Cruz released her birth certificate earlier this year in an effort to prove to skeptics that he is, indeed, eligible for the highest office in the land. What we can glean from that is that she was born in Wilmington, Delaware (yes, that's in America! She's an American citizen!).

Recently, as Cruz has focused more on his mother's biography, we've also learned that she was the first in her family to graduate from college, despite having an alcoholic father who didn't believe women should be educated. Cruz further detailed that his mother worked her way up as a computer programmer for the oil industry, a famously sexist field.

This adds to the limited public knowledge about Darragh. Cruz did write about her in his book, in which we found out that she had been married previously to a mathematician named Alan Wilson. She gave birth to a son, Michael, who died when he was an infant, which Cruz said ended her first marriage.

It sounds as if Darragh is a pretty private person, which is no small feat to maintain when your son is running for president. But from what we know about her, she at least provided a good example that women can do anything they set their minds to.