Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them.
I loved what I did. I remember cruel mothers who would pinch their children to make them cry in a scene, but my mother encircled me with affection.
I remember my mother had this deck of cards that her mother had given her and that she passed on to me. It was a gypsy tarot deck that I used to carry everywhere.
I remember sitting on a bench in New York and sobbing and realising that my ambition to be a singer was making me selfish - I was a mother with two children, and I needed a backup plan.
My earliest vivid memory would be my Nigerian mother. She would wrap me on her back. I remember being on her back a lot. It felt like a ride, like I was riding a dinosaur; going everywhere and seeing everything.
I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
I remember the bad times as a succession of painful emotional snapshots: Me walking into the library at 24 Sussex, seeing my mother in tears, and hearing her talk about leaving while my father stood facing her, stern and ashen.
When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.
I can remember when I was just, like, about four years old in Compton, and my mother would have me stack 45s, stack about ten of them, and when one would finish, the next record would drop. It was like I was DJ'ing for the house, picking out certain songs and so this song would go after that song.
I remember, after my first postpartum depression, I didn't know what had happened to me. I was stuck in this gray depression where I just wanted to retreat and pull the covers over my head and weep. My mother and I, we went to a psychiatrist, and he just patted me on the head and told me I had baby blues, which was not helpful, obviously.