I'm used to very strong women because my mother was particularly strong, and my father was away all the time. My mother was a big part of bringing up three boys, so I was fully versed in the strength of a powerful woman, and accepted that as the status quo.
My mother was strong-willed, demanding, and very supportive all at the same time.
I had a very strong-willed mother, who I totally adored. She was always in control of her life.
My mother was an artist and highly strung, whereas my father was much calmer.
I love my mother. My mother made sure, her stubbornness - she made sure we was going to eat. She made sure we had Christmases. That was my mother. My father wasn't there for that.
My mother was so stylish, but she never pushed that on me. She always thought I looked cool.
I wanted to get out in the world, have a great job, make my mark, and see how far I could go. And I wanted to make good on the philosophy my mother drilled into us with all the subtlety of a Lady Gaga performance. I got it loud and clear. I would need to succeed, and then I could possibly be happy.
My mother seemed to undermine so much of what I did, subtly belittling my choices and my activities in light of her greater, more important ones.
I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.
In the U.K., my mother had been the breadwinner. I'd seen my parents side by side. In Saudi Arabia, my mother was basically rendered disabled. She was unable to drive, dependent on my dad for everything. The religious zealotry was so suffocating.
On my daughter's first day of kindergarten, another mom said something that made me realize I had become my own Greek, suffocating mother. She said, 'Just think, in 13 years they'll leave us and go to college!' And I went, 'Gulp.'
For the first five years of Luca's life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there's a danger of suffocating your kids, too.
The world is a scary place. Even my mother has suggested I take a self defense class.
My mother wanted me to be friends only with children she considered socially suitable.
I am Mother Jones. The Government can't take my life and you can't take my arm, but you can take my suitcase.
When I was 13, I came back from summer camp - summer of '74 - and my mother had had an accident during surgery and was in an oxygen tent in a coma. It was so traumatic. My parents had been divorced for six or seven years at that point, and it was sort of the seminal event of my life.
My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon - this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio - I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.
I have the greatest respect for single parents who struggle and sacrifice, trying against almost superhuman odds to hold the family together. They should be honored and helped in their heroic efforts. But any mother's or father's task is much easier where there are two functioning parents in the home.
My mother worked full-time running a foundation, but she found all the time in the world to have supper ready every night, feed us shirred eggs on the weekends, and produce a leg of lamb for my fourth-grade Bedouin feast at school.
Until I was two, my mother supplemented her welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing. My father didn't help.
