For me, nothing has ever taken precedence over being a mother and having a family and a home.

My mother used to ask me to stay home from school and keep her company. I'd fake I was sick, and she'd fake believing me.

My mother never gave up one me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back.

When I was a child I wanted to be a vet. I'd come home with "lost" kittens and dogs. My mother would tell me to put them back.

I grew up in a broken home, working class. My paternal grandmother raised me and my brother; my father was with us, and my mother lived in Jersey.

Yes, it's true I once knocked out a horse. It was at a fiesta in my mother's home town of Guarare. Someone bet me a bottle of whiskey that I couldn't do it.

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.

It's hard and sometimes it's scary. It still amazes my mother. I went home for Christmas one year and there were fans all over the front lawn, hoping to see me.

And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.

My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.

My father, Fukujuro, drove a cab and my mother, Itsuko, was a homemaker. My parents often took me to see Impressionist exhibits. At home, I would paint pictures in a similar style.

Seeing that we were book enthusiasts, my mother began hauling my sister and me down to the Stanton Free Library on Tuesday afternoons, where I'd find two or three books to bring home.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

But even though all this was going on at home, if someone had tried to take me away and put me in a children's home, I couldn't have handled it. Even though my mother was very brutal, it was my home.

The passing of my accountant, Mary Coleman, who was the first person I shouted out on 'In Memory of...' was particularly devastating for me. She was beyond my accountant. She was my mother away from home.

I know my father believed and my mother believed in and supported the suffrage movement, and I remember my mother taking me to suffrage meetings held in the home of a Quaker family that lived not far from us.

While my mother tried to stem my truancy, it would be a complete stranger - an Army Officer in the Special Forces home on leave - who would be the mentor to drive home my mother's goal of getting me educated. His name was Saul Hassan.

We lived in Northern Quebec, and the nearest school was thirty miles away, so my mother took on the task of home schooling me. She spoke to some friends, received some instructions from the provincial school board, and found some interesting books that perhaps I might find useful.

Schizoaffective disorder is a big mental mash-up of a disease. It combines just about every disorder, from depression, delusions, and paranoia to mania, schizophrenia and hallucinations. My mother bounced between all of these regularly while raising me alone in our Hollywood home.

I was raised a Calvinist. You might think you know what that means, but let me explain it the way my mother preached it to my three sisters and me back when we were at home: 'I buy my girls Calvin Klein clothes, so that's all they know. Then, when they graduate from college, they have to figure out how to pay for them themselves.'

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