I think as far as I've been able to understand from my friends that I went to college with and things like that is that it almost seems like Russian Roulette when you're coming out of the closet to your parents.
My parents didn't speak English. They learned it little by little. They realized that education was the ticket to a better future in their own rudimentary way. They kept the house clean, kept us on the straight and narrow, and none of us ever got into trouble with the law.
The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents.
I would always thank my parents in everything I do because they sacrificed everything for me to do what I love.
My experience, with both my parents, is that grief has a lot of down, sad things, but I was also really emotionally raw, in the first year after each of them passed. Flowers smelled more intensely, my relationships were hotter, and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was 'unsober' and I wasn't playing by my rules.
I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me, nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.
In a country that provides no subsidized child care and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for parents, no universal preschool and minimal safety nets for vulnerable families, making it a crime to offer children independence in effect makes it a crime to be poor.
My parents have sailed around the world; they know what can happen and that it's not always fun, but because I want to do it so much, they agreed and supported me.
I think because both of my parents were essentially salespeople, and Italian-Americans, I always seemed to get along with people; I had a knack of finding something to talk about.
My parents owned a hair salon, so I learned a few tricks there. I can cut people's hair - if they let me.
Declining to go to church with my parents in the morning, I would ostentatiously set out for the Monist Society in the afternoon, down an obscure street which it seemed a little improper to be walking on, as everything was closed for Sunday, upstairs through a sort of side entrance over a saloon.
I really, really wanted to be an Olympian. My parents knew about this dream of mine, and they suggested I try my hand at bobsled. They'd seen it on TV at the Salt Lake City Games in 2002 and thought it would be a good sport for me.
I grew up in a musical environment. My parents played music and had it playing on the radio. They brought me to a concert at the age of 5, the same age I started violin lessons.
My parents were going through a divorce, and I used to go spend all weekend at the movies to get away from it all. There was something about the sameness of the movies. It was a place for me to go to express my emotions, you know, and let it out.
My parents opened a bank account for me when I was really little, and I think I paid for some of my university education with my savings. I've always been a bit of a saver.
I'm a very safe saver. I save everything. I save all my money and my parents raised me like that.
My parents told me that children were taken from their families in 1941, and my mother had a child taken from her - with the goal of saving him.
My parents - they tried to become American, they tried to become British, they tried to become Scandinavian - nobody wanted them, anywhere.
Innocent parents might have thought that a musical cartoon version of a fairy tale would be a child's ideal introduction to movie magic. Yet Walt Disney taught moral lessons in the most useful way: by scaring the poop out of the little ones.
