My mother was a product of World War II. My grandfather was on leave in Edinburgh when he met my grandmother.
My greatest influence has and always will be my mother. I admire her strength, fearlessness, and optimism.
The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn't do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl's mother.
The thing is that my father's story helps to communicate what was at stake with my mother, and my mother and father had so much a partnership that his story is integral to her story, as her story is to his - really, her story can't be told without his story.
Good luck to you if you're lucky enough to have faith. Some of us aren't lucky enough. My mother has great faith and finds great comfort in it, and I'm jealous of her!
Nothing can really prepare you for you the sheer overwhelming experience of what it means to become a mother. It is full of complex emotions of joy, exhaustion, love, and worry, all mixed together.
And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.
My mother had a lot of phobias. She's pregnant with me and she was a very phobic person. So I was born into phobia, basically.
If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp - or by an extremely adventurous female human.
I married a man whose Hindu father grew up in the rural north of India and whose Jewish mother grew up in the Bronx.
When my mother died, and when my father died, it's big. Our parents are giants; they're titans of our lives, so of course it's going to be a big deal.
The extraordinary thing about my mother, she's so modest about me.
The problem with my mother is that she didn't go to the doctor. And I think by the time she started to show symptoms that something might not be right, and finally went to the doctor, she was so close to her death that she couldn't get the care she had needed. Her big issue was not going to the doctor.
Often, what makes my job so exciting is designing for the mother whose dream has been to wear one of my hats at her child's wedding. I feel as responsible for making her feel like a million dollars as I do for somebody in the public eye.
Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody... as a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.
My mother believed in curses, karma, good luck, bad luck, feng shui. Her amorphous set of beliefs showed me you can pick and choose the qualities of your philosophy, based on what works for you.
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
I'm not made to be a mother.
Nobody could like Donald Trump, surely, except his mother. No one really likes The Donald. But how can you not have respect for a guy who's been down on the floor and just keeps coming back? Nothing will keep Donald Trump down until they drive a wooden stake in his heart and a silver bullet in his brain.
After about six months, I told my mother that I wanted the lessons to stop, and she was intelligent enough not to force me to continue. Besides, the lessons cost money, which was anything but abundant in our household.
I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.
My grandmother - my mother's mother - was a German Jewish refugee, an only child who came here from Berlin in 1936 at the age of 17.
My mother, at sixty, is one of those classic beauties: all neck and cheekbones, sharp lines that hide her wrinkles from a distance. She still gets whistles from construction workers from three stories up.
My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.
In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.
My mother raised us to think that if we worked hard, and if we put our end of the bargain in, it would work out OK for us.
I don't live my life as a writer. I'm a mother, an African-American woman, and I do everything that everybody else does - cook and a little bit of cleaning.
The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.
My mother would be the person all of my friends would go to for advice.
After graduating high school, Betty attended the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, the alma mater of both her parents. My mother relocated to New York because she refused to accept the oppressive racism of the Jim Crow south.
I have been a parent since I was 25. That's a large chunk of my adult life. Mother or father, it transforms you completely.
Dancing in speakeasies was a job, and none of us knew for sure who were gangsters. No one told us, so how could we know? My mother used to come and take me home. We thought nothing of walking home together at two in the morning.
It has been tough being a mother of two daughters without a co-parent because I think I was a child myself, as my mother was.
My youngest sister, Cindy, has Down syndrome, and I remember my mother spending hours and hours with her, teaching her to tie her shoelaces on her own, drilling multiplication tables with Cindy, practicing piano every day with her. No one expected Cindy to get a Ph.D.! But my mom wanted her to be the best she could be, within her limits.
I live in the county where my mother was born and buried.
My mother named me after her favorite actor, Joel McCrea, and dressed and presented me as her avatar. I'm sure she wanted to be a performer, but when that was impossible, I was her next best shot.
