I must have got my detailed obsessive streak from my father who was an English teacher because my mother wasn't like me at all.

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts my father was an evangelist a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland spreading the gospel.

A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black woman mother dyke teacher etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

Mama was my greatest teacher a teacher of compassion love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower then my mother is that sweet flower of love.

My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.

You may lose your wife you may lose your dog your mother may hate you. None of those things matter. What matters is that you achieve success and become free. Then you can do whatever you like.

Look if you ask a child 'Would you rather have a fulfilled mother or a stay-at-home Sylvia Plath ' they'll pick Sylvia Plath every time. But I think it's really important that children don't feel their parents' emotional lives depend on their success.

If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling the confidence in success which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

Obedience is the mother of success and is wedded to safety.

My mother was the dearest sweetest angel. She didn't talk she sang. She was a tower of strength.

And when I look at my mother I reflect on her strength and endurance. She's cranky sometimes but she is lovable and loving. I'd be happy to be there at 86.

I realized that while I would never be my mother nor have her life the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

If a tie is like kissing your sister losing is like kissing you grandmother with her teeth out.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.

I'm 23 years old. I might just be my mother's child but in all reality I'm everybody's child. Nobody raised me I was raised in this society.

Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards.

I don't remember ever deciding to become a performer. I just always was. I began performing by mimicking the performers on the new television that first took the attention away from me as the baby of the household. I continued performing to put a smile on my grandmother's face and always considered her when accepting or declining roles.

My mother-in-law speaks not a word of English. I speak not a word of Tajiki. So I smile at her ingratiatingly and she fixes me with a beady eye.

I was sent to a finishing school which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.

I hope every woman out there who wants to be a mother and is suffering with infertility will explore all the options and know that if you choose the science route it is okay.

My training in Science of Mind had begun with my mother. She took me to a different church every Sunday and she encouraged me to question the minister afterward.