Southern people are raised with a work ethic. My son is 5 years old and does chores. My mom was a dance teacher, and the training and discipline it takes to be a dancer I've carried with me in Hollywood.
Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened.
My mom ending up passing away, and I got really depressed and didn't have money for therapy, and so I started doing standup to cope with my mom's death.
My dad was an FBI agent. My mom and dad were straight arrow types, and I had a conservative, suburban Orange County upbringing.
To my mom, I don't know how to describe my mom. She is the most wonderful person in my life. She gave me love. She took me to the ballpark when I was just a little boy running around, hanging around.
If I should have a daughter, instead of 'Mom,' she's gonna call me 'Point B,' because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, 'Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.'
I remember seeing 'A Moon for the Misbegotten' with Colleen Dewhurst, and that made a really big impression on me, and I remember wanting to be like her and I still want to be like Colleen Dewhurst! My mom took me to a lot of theatre growing up, and I also remember seeing Pippin and being like, 'Wow!
My mom introduced me to science-fiction.
I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I was born to a single mom. She was a wonderful woman, and she taught me to believe in myself, to work hard, play by the rules. She wanted me to get a good education, and she just told me that the best thing I could do is just study hard.
Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.
What I do love is the traveling... and getting paid for it! I like being in front of a camera... It's an outlet. It's fun! If you look through my photo album, they are all modeling poses. My mom was a young mom, so she took tons of pictures of me.
I have worked so hard since I was 15 years old, all because I wanted to be a mom.
Work ethic has always been stressed in my family. My dad is going to be 80 years old and he still works part time. My mom just retired a couple years ago and she's in her mid- to late 70s.
I remember that at the beginning of the month, the kind of menus my mom and father would prepare for us would have fish, chicken. But at the end of the month - because my father would be waiting for paycheck - the refrigerator would get empty. I remember that without a lot of food left, some of the best meals happened right there.
Just having my mom be healthy is, like, so overwhelming enough. Like, my heart's just full of gratitude.
I grew up with my mom always talking to everyone everywhere, whether it was professionally or in a coffee shop. And my dad was the same way. So I love being able to talk to people, hear their stories and be inspired.
My mom worked tirelessly on getting equal rights for women.
Daddy was a salesman and away a lot, always working. My mom took me to the movies on Thursday nights because it was dish night, when they gave you a free dish along with your movie ticket.
I think 'Actions speak louder than words' is one thing, I think, I always took from my mom. And to this day, I think about that in everything I do.
If you have, especially with siblings, something like the competition for mom's affection, it just never goes away.
I grew up with my mom being very, very cheap, so when it's free, I'm like, 'Oh my God, it's free - I have to take as much as I can!'
I'm the only one in - of my siblings, my mom and my family - that hasn't been affected by Lyme disease. It's been really hard for me because I'm the only one that doesn't really understand it.
I think till I reached my mid-30s, I just rebelled and rebelled. But eventually, the one thing I did pick up from mom was paying attention to my hair. We all put eggs, oil, dahi, even beer in our hair.
I started playing guitar when I was eight. Well, I started piano and really liked it but never practiced, but it taught me how to read music, and then my mom signed me up for guitar lessons, and I connected to that way more.
My dad's American, and my mom's French. I lived in France for the first 18 years of my life, then came here to go to school at the College of William and Mary. I studied marketing. I really didn't know what I wanted to do, so I thought that's what I should do - study business - because it would give me the best chance to find work.
I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.
There was a group of six women in my household. My mom, aunts and grandma. I watched them in the kitchen.
My days are filled with writing, reading, and being a mom. Some days, I get to visit schools around the country and talk about what it's like to be a writer. I often feel like I'm pretending, because it's still hard for me to believe it when I see someone holding a book that I've written.
I come from a family of working professionals: my dad is a chartered accountant, and my mom is a professor.
I grew up in a family of Republicans. And when I was 18 and registering to vote, my mom's only instruction was 'You just go in and pull the big Republican lever.' That's my welcome to adulthood. She's like, 'No, don't even read it. Just pull the Republican lever.
My mom was extremely supportive of me, but it could err on the side of... I mean, there's supportive, and then there's just full-on over-hovering.
My family wanted church to be a place where we all went together. My dad was always traveling, and my mom was always working. School is where I did Bible classes and studied God.
While 'The Help' is in so many ways a celebration of these women's friendships and what they overcome, it's also very truthful and very painful, and it was intense for my mom to read that.
I actually had a really nice guitar as a teenager. I took jazz guitar, so my mom bought me this probably $1,600 guitar. But I got really into garage rock and local bands, and I noticed they played really crappy guitars. So I thought, 'Hey, I should get a crappy guitar, too!'
My mom has made it possible for me to be who I am. Our family is everything. Her greatest skill was encouraging me to find my own person and own independence.
'Serial Mom' tested really well when we finally got with the right audience. But they would go to some shopping mall in a deep, deep suburban L.A. neighborhood where they knew people would hate, and they just wanted to spend money to prove that people wouldn't like it. The movie was not a success when it came out.
