When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?
There was Pauline de Rothschild, who I thought was very fabulous, and Millicent Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, very chic, very clever, very original. I admired both those women very much. And I had a great example with my mother, who was extremely chic.
My mother was a beautiful lady, elegant, chic, and that was the biggest inspiration to me.
You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian.
I'm an only child. My mother was raising me alone. We couldn't afford child care; child care hours didn't work according to her schedule.
My mother taught us to play baseball, to bake a cake, to play fair - she beat the living daylights out of us sometimes, and she loved us with all her heart; she taught her favorite poets, and there is no child care in the world that will ever be a substitute for what that lady was in our life.
No matter how old we become, we can still call them 'Holy Mother' and 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them.
The first principle of child-rearing is to choose a good mother.
When 1970s feminism hit the United States, women demanded the right to natural childbirth and to have their husband or another support person in the delivery room. My mother gave birth to me during this time.
Every Mother Counts is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother. We inform, engage, and mobilize audiences to take action and raise funds that support maternal health programs around the world.
I have great childhood memories of my mother baking, and I was always a willing participant, especially if it meant I could revarnish the kitchen floor with treacle.
I've been writing an ongoing letter to my children since they were born, full of recollections of their childhoods. I've filled two journals. It's a great thing to do as a mother - you forget a lot as you go along, but reading over what you've written brings all the memories back.
So my father grew up in an orphanage in Boston. He was then adopted by an elderly childless couple from Maine, who gave him the name of Mitchell. He moved to Maine, and there he met my mother and was married.
The absence of doll babies in my toy chest didn't seriously influence my later decision not to become a mother; rather, I disdained Hasbro's Baby Alive wetting doll because I was already the kind of girl who would grow up to be childless by choice.
The longest, most solid and complex relationship in my life is with my mother. It started before I was born, and now, when I am 71 and living in California and she is 92 and living in Chile, we are still in touch daily.
There were times my mom and I butted heads - over my curfew, over something like that. Whenever we would hit these moments of emotional backfire, she would say, 'You just don't understand what it's like to be a mother... I could never handle losing you.' I was like, 'OK, but just, like, chill out.'
Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
When I was a little girl, if I didn't eat my soup, my mother would say, 'You have to think of all the Chinese children who have nothing to eat.' But now, for my children, Chinese people make everything, and for my grandchildren, they buy everything.
My mother raised me in the church. I was not allowed to stay home on Sunday; there was no option. I sang in the choir all the way up until I went to college.
That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means.
