I was born with a mother who loved me unconditionally and with a sense of humor.
The last time I saw my mom was in 1997. My mom started getting sick, and my mom finally passed away in 2002. My mom was my world. My mom was everything to me. We didn't have money. We didn't have a whole lot of materialistic things, but one thing I can truly say, that my mother loved me and all of her children unconditionally.
To get me in to the Army underage, my mother signed me in saying that my birth certificate was lost in a fire in Nashville, so I got in underage. I was 16. She did because I begged her to do it.
My mother never liked that I worked undercover. She always worried.
I was studying at Stanford University with two quarters left to go before receiving an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. Then, I got the telephone call from my mother. I had no choice. I went home, and I jumped into the company feet first, right from day one. There was no time to grieve my father.
Personally, I wear a lot of my mother-in-law's chiffons and my mother's silk. But when I buy saris for myself, then they have to be understated.
As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.
My mother had various jobs, from where she was regularly fired as politically undesirable. I often saw her crying and mumbling that we'll starve to death.
I don't hold myself out as a role model. I don't believe that everyone should make the same choices; that everyone has to want to be a CEO, or everyone should want to be a work-at-home mother. I want everyone to be able to choose. But I want us to be able to choose unencumbered by gender choosing for us.
It's unfathomable how you live without your mother.
I wish I had a dollar for every pro-choicer who told me that abortion has to be accessible for poor women... as if being poor makes you an unfit mother.
I wasn't ready to be a dog's mother! Trust me, I'm completely unfit and irresponsible. I'm a comic that travels 48 weeks a year, but I make it work, so you can, too.
My mother got pregnant with me at the age of fifteen. This was '64, and unheard of at that time.
My parents were singularly uninterested in me. My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.
Uniqueness was something my mother pounded into me.
I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn't get religious later in life.
The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?
My mother was a journalist, so writing is not unnatural to me.
Since babyhood, I've always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church causes.
If I had not played basketball and made the millions of dollars that I had made, I would never have been able to build a hospital in Congo. It started in 1997, and 10 years later I was able to unveil the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, named after my mother, in my hometown outside of Kinshasa. It was such a blessing.
