I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.
My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty cents that the adults had to pay.
My mother desperately wanted children. She had a child that was stillborn - something I learned when I was looking through her 'effects' after she had died. It was then that I discovered my original birth certificate, which indicated the previous birth.
I'm not saying my mother didn't like me, but she kept looking for loopholes in my birth certificate.
I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother - my mother's mother - who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.
I don't really remember, but I'm positive that whenever I cried, my mother gave me something to eat. I'm sure that whenever I had a fight with the little girl next door, or it was raining and I couldn't go out, or I wasn't invited to a birthday party, my mother gave me a piece of candy to make me feel better.
My mother loved entertaining, and I've followed suit, so we have big celebrations for New Year, Passover, Thanksgiving and birthdays.
Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.
'Suffering should not make us bitter people,' my mother once said, 'it should make us better comforters.' Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they'll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.
Mother's Day is a bittersweet day for many of us. We all have mothers, but some of us have lost them.
I saw this Facebook video of a boy, probably around seven, wearing a dress he had fashioned from a blanket, sashaying through his house while his mother applauded and cheered him on. He was so proud. It was such a beautiful thing but bittersweet because I knew his spirit would change soon: that he'd become self-aware and ashamed at some level.
The 10 or 20 minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic; there is no adventure I would have traded them for.
I come from a magnetic field of Catholicism. I was baptised by my mother's family, who were all traditional Catholics. But my mother was the black sheep of the family - she ran away to the ballet at 17.
I was the black sheep of the family, and my mother never really understood me.
If Mother Theresa went to Atlantic City, I don't think she'd start playing Blackjack.
My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.
My mother raised me to open the car door, open the door; if you take a woman out, you should pick up the check, and blah blah blah - whatever.
My mother died of a stroke in 1974, and for a long time, I blamed myself. She was utterly devastated when I told her I was a lesbian not long before.
Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.
For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.
