We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.
I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'
By now, you've probably caught on to something: my mother is always standing by with just the right Scripture or inspirational saying to get me through any tough situation.
My mother was a Bohemian - in the good sense of the word. A searcher. And she investigated various religions.
It was always about being first, about winning. There were no prizes for second place. My mother and father said, 'Do whatever you want, as long as you're the best at it.'
My mother had a son from previous marriage and her husband died in Second World War.
I remember my grandfather believed women were second-class citizens and told my mother that it was a shame she had brains because she was a girl and shouldn't carry on her education.
Nothing in life prepared me for the way I felt about being a mother. Until then, I sort of felt like a blank sheet of paper. I was always trying to second-guess myself, to be what others wanted me to be.
Even a secret agent can't lie to a Jewish mother.
One day, as I was speaking to another mother of a disabled child, I said our secret weapon against this disease is to do all we can without any expectation of results.
My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.
My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.
The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.
I hate to say that my mother was 'just a housewife', because in addition to that she has had lots of part-time secretarial jobs in factories and hospitals, always working really hard for our family.
My mother was born into a segregated America. How crazy is that?
Scrawling 'I'm gay' in lipstick on your parents' bedroom mirror may demonstrate a personal signature of the highest style, but is not particularly sensitive to their feelings. Upon hearing me utter those words almost twenty years ago, my own mother did what and self-respecting middle-class mom would do: went directly into a seizure.
I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.
My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story that it would make me laugh. I have no plans to find out if this is true.
My father who was there in the house, he wasn't at all a role model. And my mother, who was trying to protect me from him as best she could, she took me everywhere with her, which gave me a tremendous amount of sensitivity to the things women go through.
My mother and I are more than best friends; we are partners in crime. After she and my father, Quincy Jones, separated when I was 10 years old, my sister, Kidada, who was 12, went to live with our dad, and I stayed with my mother.
