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I can't bear the thought of my mother having to push me around in a wheelchair. I'd rather die quickly.

My dad died when I was three so my mom had to raise four kids on her own, and I think there's a part of me that pulls upon having watched my mom do that our whole lives. She had to make it work.

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

I was raised by a lady that was crippled all her life but she did everything for me and she raised me. She washed our clothes, cooked our food, she did everything for us. I don't think I ever heard her complain a day in her life. She taught me responsibility towards my brother and sisters and the community.

You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian.

As a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.

Being a father helps me be more responsible... you see more things than you've ever seen.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.