My mother and I split ways when I was very young and have never really reconciled.
I would have to say that my very first encounter with the arts was when my mother bought me my first record player when I was six years old as well as a Karen Carpenter record.
It's really much more than the plastic of album covers and record sales and dollars and cents. Music is just everybody's mother. Music is the power of you.
I love the classic crooners, but I got that from my mother - she worked in a record store.
When I look back at those pictures of my mother performing - and listen to her recordings - it makes me sad to think that all of that joy she found in her work came to an end. I wish she hadn't had to make that sacrifice, even if it was for the benefit of my father and siblings and me.
When I was growing up, my mother worked, and in the evenings, the whole family would sit around the dinner table and recount the day.
My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
I went to jail for a year when I was 17. When I got out, my mother took me to the recruiting office, and I spent the next six years in the Navy.
When I got pregnant, I started singing again. It was my saving grace. I literally mean having this amazing human life, and our relationship in the sense of mother and child, redeemed my soul.
Now I'm a wife and a mother of two. It's a really different role. I always referred to No Doubt as a marriage, because that's what it's like to be together for so long and go through what we've been through. I can't really have that relationship with them anymore.
I was always a reformer. My father and mother were progressives, and they believed in the universal vote, vote for women, land reform, and a lot of things which at one time were not accepted; they're much more accepted now.
My mother enjoyed acting as well with my father, who used to direct her in plays at his regiment. My sister is an excellent singer. However, it was only me who decided to pursue acting as a career.
I don't believe in regretting - one should try to move on. My mum was good at that. She was deeply in love with my father, and he died when I was nine. She remarried, and her second husband died, too. I saw the grieving process she went through. My mother had this way of moving on. It was a fine trait.
Rosa Parks was the queen mother of a movement whose single act of heroism sparked the movement for freedom, justice and equality. Her greatest contribution is that she told us a regular person can make a difference.
My mother made me believe in reincarnation, in karma. If I live a good life, I believe I will be reincarnated as a higher being. If I live a bad life, I believe I will be reincarnated as a lower being.
When I got out of high school, I wanted to be an actor but was getting a lot of rejections. I was getting rejected by life. My mother, God rest her soul, told me not to quit.
I was very much in love with my mother. She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.
I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.
When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.
The Indian was a religious man from his mother's womb.
