Be it Valentine's Day, Father's Day or Mother's Day, I feel all days are reminders of some feelings. February 14 doesn't hold any special relevance for me.
I had time with my mother, but I really lived with my father. One time he gave all his salary so I could travel to a training camp. He couldn't pay the rent, but he did that.
Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.
What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.
My grandparents - both of my mother's parents - were actors, and they ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company, through the town of Reading, where I come from.
My mom said to me: 'Sonny, you need to study English.' And I replied to her: 'Mom, I do not need it. I'm going to be horse-boy, would I speak English with horses?' Mom said: 'Darling, you need to.' But I did not listen to my mother.
I liked the books I read that said things like 'I shan't'. I would try to find a way to say in my life, to reply, 'I shan't do that, mother.' That was so far away from my barrio world.
I'm not a princess. My mother is, not I. I am the niece of a head of state. And with this status, I have some representational duties - nothing very constraining or very exceptional.
My late mother moved back to her parents' homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the thirteen other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.
I had one request when I started doing the plays. My prayer was, 'God, let me do well enough to be able to take care of my mother.' I was able to do that 'til the day she died because of my audience.
Being a father or a mother is not only a great challenge, it is a divine calling. It is an effort requiring consecration.
We cannot elect a president who provides no hope to the laid-off union worker, no hope for the mother of five and no hope for the researcher who might find a cure for cancer. We cannot elect a leader who is willfully ignorant to the outcry of young people who want real criminal justice reform and responsible gun safety legislation now.
Sometimes you resent the people you love and need the most. Love is so fascinating in all its forms, and I think everyone who has ever been a mother will relate to this.
My mother was a Mohawk, born and raised on a reservation, and when I was a kid, she would take me there to visit her relatives.
My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous - he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table.
My mother taught me to treat a lady respectfully.
I was always very quiet, and I think everyone thought that was because I was a good child. I'd sit there in silence, but it wasn't until my mother was calling me one day when I was very young that she realised something was wrong because I wasn't responding.
I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.
I know what it meant to me to play the Reverend Mother, a role I've, in some ways, prepared a lifetime to do. It's why I took the part.
Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.
