No one understands my ills, nor the terror that fills my breast, who does not know the heart of a mother.
Oddly enough, I'm not a particularly judgmental person. I just don't have a lot of filtering when I'm in 'tiger mother' mode. I say what comes into my head.
My character on 'The Sopranos' was specific to being a single mother and being from Jersey. And being part of that season finale... wow. That show is always going to be world-renowned and iconic.
When it came to my childhood - growing up in a single-parent home, often struggling financially - my mother definitely instilled in me and my siblings this strength, this will, to just continue to survive and succeed.
My mother raised me with God. We were poor financially, but we were rich spiritually.
Do not sit next to my mother when she is watching one of her children compete because you will have fingernails down your back. She is a nervous wreck.
With my mother, I moved from one household to another before settling in the eastern part of Finland, in the city of Kuopio.
My mother birthed three children and she adopted myself and another African-American son. My adoptive parents were Finnish. I grew up in a white picket neighborhood.
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
When I had my first child, I went back to Ireland to live with my mother. So, a typical day there was me being a mother, with my mum showing me how to do things.
From what I hear, it's a normal thing to feel guilty as a mother, especially when trying to fill the needs of a newborn along with maintaining what you had with your first child.
My father was Catholic, and my mother wanted me to go to Catholic school. That's what I did in first grade. But she couldn't afford the payments. I think it must have hurt her a lot, not to be able to give me a Catholic education.
I'll be a wife and mother first, then First Lady.
My mother's very proud of the name she gave me. She thought it sounded rhythmically better. It doesn't really make a difference to me what people call me, but since my mother calls me Holly Marie when she's angry, I prefer just my first name.
I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.
I've been travelling, returning home for promotional appearances, and juggling it all with being the mother of a five-year-old.
It was less in pity than in anger that the world was moved by the photograph of little Alan Kurdi, that dead three-year-old Syrian refugee boy whose name we're all remembering now on the first anniversary of his drowning, along with his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother Rehanna.
In 2012, a five-year-old girl in Shandong province described to me how ten officials had chased her six-months-pregnant mother through the fields to prevent the birth of the family's second child, a boy. She died during the procedure.
I think that the best way to explain that is that my mother gave me all the color and character and flare and liveliness, and my father gave me all the sanity and nature and all the things that helped me be a more rounded human being.
My grandfather gave me inspiration to cook, and love food and flavors. My Aunt Raffie, gave me creativity and the inspiration to create new things. My mother inspires me to find simplicity in food.
