Growing up, there wasn't an exact Hispanic role model that I had. I didn't realize how big a difference I was making, going to the Olympics and being Hispanic, until I would be in an autograph session, and parents would come up to me and say, 'You know, our family is so proud of you, you're really doing Hispanics proud.'
I've been able to help my family financially since making my first hit record. I bought my parents a house. My husband and I have a property in Portugal and one in Mumbles, Wales, and my family are always coming out to visit us. It has been fantastic to have such a successful career and to have been able to help everyone.
You should hear what my parents wanted to call me. It was between Brown Rice, Neon Hitch and Z. Ziggurat Zanzibar Zandorf. I'm not joking. Imagine fitting that on my passport!
My family is a middle-class family. When I grew up and learned how much it actually cost for us to play hockey, I could not believe that my parents let us play as long as they did.
As a kid growing up in Montreal, I wanted to become either a hockey player or a wrestler. Since my family didn't have a lot of money, my parents never put me in a hockey league because it was so expensive.
As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.
Underfunded, underwhelmed, and out of their league from the git-go, my parents took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.
Phil Niekro and his brother were pitching against each other in Atlanta. Their parents were sitting right behind home plate. I saw their folks more that day than they did the whole weekend.
I always get super stoked to go to the Open, because it's in my home state. I get to stay in my parents' house and get to eat pancakes.
I have a son, who is a... not an ordinary form of schizophrenia, but clearly, cannot take care of himself. And the great fear of then, of all parents is, when the parents die, who takes care of your child? And the answer is: they become homeless.
The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.
When gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals come out, their friends and families, for the most part, understand what it feels like to love and to lust. Cisgender people have more of a challenge when it comes to transgender identities. I discovered that analogy of homesickness in conversations with my parents, in trying to bridge that empathy divide.
My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.
I want to say that nobody accuses their parents of abusing them without justification to do that. I didn't just make it up. A lot of things were true and abusive and horrible things that happened to me that my father did.
I think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody. That's why I wrote 'Smart Women.' I want kids to read that and to think what life might be like for their parents. And I want parents to think about what life is like for their kids.
Steven Spielberg's name was all over 'Poltergeist,' and 'E.T.' was out the same year, which every single parent took their child to. So despite 'Poltergeist' being a horror movie, I convinced my parents to let me see it. It was terrifying. I guess this says a lot about me as a six-year-old, because I loved it.
I grew up in a house my parents built together on a mountain in Tennessee. When we moved in, the walls were still going up, we didn't have hot water, and we turned it into an amazing adventure.
Iranian parents can't stop their children. They're just wild - they want to party, they want their rights, they want to paint, they want to dance. No one can stop these new generations coming. That's why Iran has to open up: it's like a pot full of hot water, vapour and steam.
My parents divorced when I was young but I was brought up in two really loving households. I didn't have a contentious relationship with my mom or dad.
According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own.
