Growing up, Ty Lewis only saw one side of her mom: the strong one. "She was always a hero," she tells POPSUGAR.

In their small town of Meridian, GA, or what Lewis calls the "backwoods country," everyone was considered family. And her mom, Gertrude Jordan, took that seriously as both an educator and a neighbor. "My mom was known in the community as the woman who would always give her shirt off of her back, who took care of other people's children — and if a child in her classroom didn't have something, she always gave," Lewis recalls.

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