My mother raised me as a vegetarian, but when I turned 18, I decided to expand my palate.
Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.
On Mother's Day, I like to feel pampered. I like to feel celebrated. I like to feel honored. I like to feel glamorous.
My family comes from Panama, and I grew up in a single parent household with my mother, who barely spoke English. She couldn't get a good job, yet there were four of us for her to raise.
I was hellbent on going to drama school, but my mother, rightly, panicked and persuaded me to go to university on the grounds that a degree would be 'something to fall back on.' Whilst at college, I realised I wasn't good enough or robust enough to be an actress.
After he retired, Dad worked at my uncle's boat company, a camp for kids, and eventually became County Commissioner for a term. He is known around town, works at the Food Pantry my mother helped start, and is a very serious member of Kiwanis.
There is no greater name for a leader than mother or father. There is no leadership more important than parenthood.
My mother and I parting company at four years old is a recurring theme; although it's not symbolically necessarily present, it's present in all my relationships.
I wanted to make a human monster. His name is Coffin Baby. The idea is based on a group of people from Pasadena whose names I can't mention. His mother died and during the funeral, this baby came out of her in the coffin.
My mother and our pastor always said you have to pray for your enemies and people who do you wrong, and that's what I did.
Being a mother is complicated because it's not just a paternal culture making demands on you; it's those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
My mother was a Jewish General Patton.
People think that I popped out of my mother's womb singing 'Chasing Pavements'.
The day I turned 16, I moved into my own flat. My parents had just broken up, and I didn't want to go back to Ireland with my mother. I was doing my A-levels, and my friends would come over and watch 'Twin Peaks.'
But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.
Mostly, I spend my time being a mother to my two children, working in my organic garden, raising masses of sweet peas, being passionately involved in conservation, recycling and solar energy.
I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation's oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood, she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite.
My mother was a pediatrician, and she kept busy hours. I learned from her you could pack a lot into the day. Every minute had to count, and multitasking was a given.
We were the outliers: my mother was the only Western woman (khawagayya, in Egyptian Arabic) to have married into the family, and during my childhood, we were the only members living outside of Egypt. So between my father's prestige as the eldest son and my own exotic pedigree, I basked in the spotlight.
I read a lot on self-esteem issues, and a mother has more impact on the self-esteem of her daughter than peer pressure or media or television.
