A Quote by Monty Don
My father was an army officer who left the forces when I was six and never really fitted back into civilian life. My mother had five children and a mother with Alzheimer's, who lived with us, so I imagined that she had a lot to do.
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My mother was very passionate about life and she would do anything for us. And she had to fight alone to raise us. We never had a lot of money for extras or anything. She had to work six days a week, and then she would do breakfast, lunch and dinner. She was a super-woman! For me, I don't know how she did it with three kids.
In my earliest of years, my mother was a huge force in my life. She was for all intents and purposes, a single parent. My father had abandoned us. He was an alcoholic and a physical abuser. My mother lived through that tyranny and made her living as a domestic worker. She was uneducated but she brought high principles and decent values into our existence, and she set lofty goals for herself and for her children. We were forever inspired by her strength and by her resistance to racism and to fascism.
My father, a musician who worked with All India Radio, is no more. My mother had a government job at BSNL and was always opposed to my career in acting. She had seen the life my father had lived and did not like it.
She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.
My father left us when I was 10, so I had to make enough money for us to be able to live in a house because my brother went in the service during Vietnam and I was sole support of my mother. And she had no skills, really, except to clean other people's houses. So I had to have a bunch of jobs, you know, as well as music.
A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother. She was an unhappy wife. She had never known what it was to be a good mother. She didn't have a good mother of her own. And so there's a kind of parenting that doesn't happen.
I think my mother had a lot of opportunity when she was a kid. She was a model, and she did a lot of things in her life, but she had no real ambition. I think my mother really did want a home and kids and all of that.
I do mean this - I had the good fortune of being around a number of Alzheimer's patients in the last three years of my mother's life. She was in a care facility that was devoted to just people with memory-loss issues. I found those people engaging and generous in ways that I had not imagined.
My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour; I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.
I had my father's mind, but he had his mother's mind. Fortunately, his mother lived with us and so I early realized that intellectual abilities of the kind I shared with my father and grandmother were not sex-linked.
Oddly, moving to L.A. had nothing to do with me wanting to be an actress. My mother had a friend who was willing to take us in for a month until we could get on our feet. So we lived on her floor. It was pretty traumatic, but I found my strength through my mother in that time because she never once made us feel like we wouldn't be OK.
I just feel so blessed to have had the time that I had with my mother. She made it so impactful in terms of how she raised me and my little brother, the values that she instilled in us, the way she inspired us, and how she lived her everyday life.
My mother was really young when she had me, so she was a horrible cook, but we lived with my grandmother, who was fantastic. We eventually got our own place, and my mother started learning to cook. But it was also the '70s, so she was very experimental, and, well - thank God we had a dog.
My mother had seven children in seven years. No twins. She also had a three-legged beagle who was compelled to bite strangers, a freakishly big double-pawed tomcat who regularly left dead rabbits on the front doorstep, and 70 white mice that one or another of us had smuggled home from my father's research laboratory.
My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.
From my mother came the idea that going down to the sea repaired the spirit. That is where she walked when she was sad or worried or lonely for my father. If she had been crying, she came back composed; if she had left angry with us, she returned in good humor. So we naturally believed that there was a cleansing, purifying effect to be had; that letting the fresh wind blow through you mind and spirits as well as your hair and clothing purged black thoughts; that contemplating the ceaseless motion of the waves calmed a raging spirit.
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