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My father and my mother separated when I was two.

I lost my mother when I was very young, and my father when I was in college.

I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour; I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.

I was born to a single mom and raised by her and my grandparents.

I lived with my mother all my life until she died, and I don't really think I knew her, because I was always using her as my mother, if you know what I mean.

My mother died of cystic fibrosis before I knew her. I was two years old, and I don't remember her. I do remember, though, when it was just my father and me, before he met the woman who would become the mother who raised me, before my younger sister, Gillian. It was just the two of us, and he was my whole world.

I'm very close to my mother, but not a single other person in my family.

My mother is a special story. She went through so much to bring us up, four men at home, especially when our country was going through really difficult times.