In the past, when I'd recorded during a break in a tour, it was so easy to sing, because I felt strong. Also, like so many new mothers, I wasn't getting a lot of sleep, and sleeping is such a huge part of being able to sing.
I think of my parents as a single unit, and it's interesting because they shared so much, and they were totally opposite. My mother, a Martha Graham dancer, had a classical background; my father had a back-porch background.
I grew up in Alabama in a very small town and didn't have access to the finest of anything, really. But my mother was the kind of woman who just wanted us, me and my sisters, to be exposed to any and anything she could find.
And for anyone who ever thought that Ellen and I broke it off because of sexuality, you couldn't be more mistaken. And for anyone who thought my mother's prayers had anything to do with me marrying a man, forget it.
My mother and father come from that post-Depression, middle-of-World-War -I kind of thinking that says, 'Find a practical job. You know what I mean, Mr. Big Shot? So, you can sing a song ...'
How the hell would she support herself and her mother if Agua Dulce’s new owner built one of those mega service stations right next door? Or worse yet, right on top of them.
The blessing of my mother is that she is so interested, she is so bright, she never complains - the joy of the Lord just bubbles out of her. Anybody who's in her presence is blessed to be there.
Bearing my mother's face was a daily reminder that I could be as strong as she had been. And fighting for what I wanted most in life was the best way to keep her alive in my heart.
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
My mother is American. I first went to school in America, and we came back when I was about six to rural Norfolk. In primary school, I was teased immediately and mercilessly. I probably dropped that accent within about 10 days.
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film. She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is.
My parents were very supportive and always encouraged us. My father was a gentle, nice man. My mother was quite a colorful character and a keen reader who encouraged me to write.
When I was little, I got to pick my hair ribbon from my mother's collection that hung over her dressing-table mirror. I have an entire room of ribbons in my New York apartment.
it was always something what we did or said, and there would be this flash, and then it didn't subside. all your past sins would be brought up, it was just endless. and my mother attributed it sometimes to having neuralgia, but she never showed that ...
I always knew I wanted to create. I used to sit in my room for hours drawing and making things. I once got into trouble for cutting up my mother's lampshades to make a dress. I was three.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
I went from resenting my mother-in-law to accepting her, finally to appreciating her. What appeared to be her diffidence when I was first married, I now value as serenity.
The capacity for extravagant emotion that my husband finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament.
A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.
When I was 14, my mother died. My father, who had always had ulcers, came apart. He had a series of intestinal operations, and was in the hospital for nearly a year. So the four of us teenagers lived by ourselves in the apartment without a guardian.
