I do think having a mother as a nurse who's a very kind of compass - , she's so compassionate and she really unfortunately would take her work home with her sometimes.
My mother never put an emphasis on looks. She let us grow up on our own time line. She never forced any beauty regimen into my world.
The British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley`s group, the black shirts, they were banned in Britain in 1940. And Max Mosley`s dad, Sir Oswald Mosley, ended up spending three years in World War II, 1940 to 1943, interned in the U.K. as basically an enemy of the state. He spent that time in prison, as did Max Mosley`s mother.
My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.
The reason we all need a mutton alert, which needs constant testing, like smoke alarms, is because there is really no such thing as age-appropriate dressing any longer, as I know because my wardrobe is interchangeable with my daughter's.
My maternal family are South African and when I was small and my parents separated my mother and I went back to South Africa. So for me the emergence of my own childhood consciousness was in the context of 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa and the movement there.
The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.
I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.
What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.
To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.
I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.
I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.
This must be part of Mother Nature's master plan—making these boys so irresistibly cute, in such a naughty way, that the purity of their intentions becomes irrelevant.
Her phone rang again. “What?” she snapped as she answered it. Myrnin, of course. “Are you on your way?” “No!” “Claire, there are things to do.” “Here, too,” she said. “And I’m staying here, believe me.” Myrnin was silent for a beat, and then he said, “Bob would be very disappointed in you.” “Bob the spider?” “He looks at you like a mother, you know. I’m surprised at your lack of work ethic. Think of the example you set for—” She hung up on him and turned the phone on vibrate and relaxed in Shane’s arms.
I eat excellent bread, clean meat, good crisp veggies, organic fruits and nice wine and cheese. It is one of the things I am truly grateful for. I'm not kidding. You can't ask a single mother of three working two jobs for minimum wage to eat that way. I am lucky.
I was always a person on my mother's hip in the kitchen. My mom really wanted her kids at her side as much as possible, and she worked in restaurants for over fifty years. And my grandfather had ten children, and he grew and prepared most of the food. My grandmother, on my mother's side, was the family seamstress and the baker. So my mom, the eldest child, was always in the kitchen with my grandpa and I was always in the production and restaurant kitchens and our own kitchen with my mom. And it's just something that has always spoken to me.
I don't know that I have a favorite meal. When I'm cooking I'm thinking about the person I'm feeding and I want to make them whatever they want. My husband's favorite meal is carbonara. I guess my favorite food is anything my mom makes. Because like anybody who loves their mother's cooking, if you try and make your mom's recipes, they never taste quite the same. And I don't know if that's because she's lying about what she's putting in there and just not telling me. Like when I turn my back, she's sneaking something in there. It just never seems to taste the same.
I don't think that I could have survived in my family without a naughty sense of humor; yeah, absolutely. I think my brother and I both get our senses of humor from our parents. I mean, my mother was absolutely hilarious and foul. She had the most ridiculously off color sense of humor, so that was sort of what we grew up with.
When I moved to New York out of college, that was my goal. To be a stage actress. And to do dramatic works. Like Madea, and Night, Mother, and Sam Shepard, and all that kind of stuff. Thats what I really wanted to do.
I bear a deep red stain that runs from my left shoulder down to my right hip, a trail left by the herbwitch's poison that my mother used to try to expel me from her womb.
My mother always told me if you write about life, you will always be in the game. Just don't write songs write life. I decided to take her up on that.
I never felt like I had a mother.
If I don't have a mother, I'll let music be my mother.
Some summers my father would take us down to visit our grandmother in Louisville, who was an ex-slave, Susan Jones, and she had a shotgun shack they call it, and no electricity, a well in the back, a coal stove, kerosene lamps.
One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed.