A mother and a little boy were walking along, and I could tell the minute the recognition hit the little boy. As he walked by holding his mother's hand, he said in a real loud voice, 'Look, Mother. There goes an old Gomer Pyle.'
One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone.
My first car was, as depicted in 'Sleepwalk with Me,' my mother's '92 Volvo station wagon that had 80,000 miles on it, and I had put 40,000 miles on it, so by the time it retired it had 120,000, and I basically killed it. It served me well, and my mechanic was always very angry with me because I just didn't properly care for it.
My father was a construction worker most of his life. My mother, when she came from Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, to the United States, never had a chance to go to college either and became a clerical worker. But they did nothing but build this country.
I had a mother that told me what to do all my life, and I traded that in for a wife. We got married two years out of high school which is not what you tell your kids to do, right?
When I was 15, I came downstairs one morning, picked up mother's newspaper and, oh, what a shock! The Titanic had gone. The 'unsinkable' ship - but it had gone down so simple.
The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.
Don't be like my mother when my father had a heart attack. My mother had never handled the finances. I don't ever want to see anybody go through that. Women shouldn't be in that position.
Growing up, I wanted to be a musician. My mother, in typical Filipino-mom fashion, would always make me go up in front of people at parties to sing. Back then, as a kid, I was mortified. In retrospect, I see that doing that as a child helped me get over my fear of being in front of people.
My mother, Marnie Fahr Steyer, was a lifelong smoker - up to three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. I like to think that, if Mom were still with us today, she'd be happy with the strides we've made to protect our children from the ongoing health crisis of tobacco addiction.
My mother is old-fashioned; she raised us like girls from a 19th-century book. My sisters and I are known for being the most polite girls in France. My mother wanted us to be like royalty: never ever will you be caught being rude, or superficial or being a star or whatever.
Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.
My mother died of a stroke in 1974, and for a long time, I blamed myself. She was utterly devastated when I told her I was a lesbian not long before.
Like every mother, it's my children; that's the first thing that makes me really proud. For my own part, it would be when I became a Queen's Counsel in 1995. I was the 76th woman ever to become a Queen's Counsel, so it was still a pretty rare thing.
I think people hear and feel the genuine nature of my passion for the causes. Specifically, with the non-profit in Uganda, my mother is the president, and she was an African politics professor for almost 50 years, so I think people know that I align myself with people who know what they're talking about.
I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.
I guess the most seminal moment going early way back was my father died when I was 3 years old. I was raised by my grandparents, and my mother went back and got a degree.
Listen, it's not nice to have your mum kill herself, that is difficult. But at the end of the day, it happened a long time ago. My mother was, I hope, not the reason that I have been successful. It's not as simplistic as 'My mum killed herself; I've got to prove myself.' I was very lucky that my parents took an interest in me.
I'm a director, but I gotta have the hair, the makeup and the heels. My mother would be appalled if I didn't dress up.
I have never in my life let a man disrespect me, verbally or physically, and that will never change. I feel very strongly about this because it's something my mother instilled in me and that I have instilled in my daughters.
No one knows what an amazing spirit she was. She wasn't only a mother; she was a best friend.
My father was a dark-skinned brother, but my mother was a very fair-skinned lady. From what I understand, she was Creole; we think her people originally came from New Orleans. She looked almost like a white woman, which meant she could pass - as folks used to say back then. Her hair was jet-black. She was slim and very attractive.
I believe that at least 70 percent of parenting goes to the mother. In our house, I'm the one who knows about all the school stuff, helps with the homework, organizes the play dates, and remembers the birthday parties.
Of course we had our arguments; we had everything, but at the end of the day, that was still my mother, my confidante - my everything.
With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.
From an early age my mother told me that there were so many of us that if I was to get anything in life I would have to get it myself. So I did.
I was named after my mother's maiden name.
For breakfast, I usually have a slice of bread with some homemade jam made from fruit from the garden; the type of jam depends on what particular fruit is being harvested. I learned how to make it from my mother.
My mother always cultivated my imagination from the time I was very little.
My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.
I was very close to my mother as the youngest of three. She was my playmate.
There are people and nations, Mother, that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you in silence, I entrust them to you in the way that you know best.
On the good days, my mother would haul out the ukulele and we'd sit around the kitchen table - it was a cardboard table with a linoleum top - and sing.
My real mother is a survivor, very strong and respected by the people who know her, but our relationship is not easy - but then, it was never going to be.
When I was a young boy, very young boy, mothers didn't work. Women were home, they took care of the house, they washed the dishes and took care of the children. That's what they did, and that's what my mother did.
I hope, what I hope the most is to be more successful as a mother than in show business, because to be a mother is the most difficult I will ever have to do.
