My father still is a lawyer and my mom was a teacher and then later a career counselor.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor - got her master's with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

Miami Beach - that's where I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family led by my maternal grandfather. Me my great-grandmother - a Holocaust survivor who was my roommate - my grandparents my mom and her brother all shared a four-bedroom house.

My mom had me when she was 16 and I was an only child which is probably why I received a lot of love and didn't miss that my father wasn't around.

I look at my father. He is one of my heroes. He is such an incredible classy man. He was such a great father and such a great husband in so many ways and we lived through some pretty tough times losing my mom. When I see all that he did I think 'Wow that's a really wonderful man.'

My mom was a ventriloquist and she always was throwing her voice. For ten years I thought the dog was telling me to kill my father.

Dinner 'conversation' at the Cohens' meant my sister mom and I relaying in brutal detail the day's events in a state of amplified hysteria while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head.

Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now not even my mom.

My mom loved rock 'n roll. My father hated it. We couldn't play it when he was around.

I'm ridiculous in my oversharing my mom and sister are very open but a little more judicious than me... and my father is a decidedly private person.

My father wasn't really involved and my mom is the light in my life.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say but in the lives they lead.

Kennedy lied and lied about his health while he was alive even using his father's influence to get into the Navy without ever taking a medical examination.

Three of my children are medical doctors they know at least a hundred times as much about your body as my grandfather knew but they don't know much more about soul than he did.

My father and mother were second cousins though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.

My father was a Catholic but my mother wasn't. She had to do that weird deal you do as a Catholic - they deign to sanction your marriage and you have to bring your children up as Catholics.

My parents had a wonderful marriage but it was a very dependent relationship. My mother was entirely dependent on my father because that's how it was in those days.

Second marriage is an issue that our Founding Fathers wisely left to the states.

My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.

My parents had an arranged marriage as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it and I will continue to write about it.

My older sister was at the cusp of new wave and I had older brothers from my father's first marriage who were rock 'n' roll guys so I was exposed to a lot of popular culture.

My argument is simple which is that for several thousand years in Western civilization marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.

Same-sex marriage would eliminate entirely in law the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child. It would create a society which deliberately chooses to deprive a child of either a mother or a father.