I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
I grew up with an Italian family in an era when a woman's path was laid out for her: You got married and had children. Simple, right? Then I got to a point around the age of 30 when I had three little children and was a single mom, and I realized life was not so simple.
What I didn't understand was that the personal and the political go together. I felt at the time I had to sacrifice my children's present for their future. It seemed an either/or. I didn't realise that by being with one's own children I would have had a better understanding of the ones who are not my own. I was thinking of them but I didn't spend the time that they needed from me. It's a tribute to them that they came out so well.
I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
I got married at 17, had three kids by the time I was 24, and have never had much time alone. I never had time to develop hobbies. Now, if I have nothing to do, I just find myself cleaning drawers incessantly.
It was a very hard life. As I got older, the family was depending very much on me. My two older brothers got married, so they had their own families depending on them. I had seven people relying on me, so I worked in a grocery store.
Seattle's support system got me through those early, difficult years. It was a very funky, very friendly, very relaxed place that had it all for a writer.
I'm very pragmatic in that I know there are very few greats in anything. I got lucky just to have gotten two of the real great filmmakers very early on. Better to have had them than to not have had them. I've been really fortunate. That's the key relationship on a movie: the director and the actor. Of course, you can't compare the experiences. When you're in your early 20s, you're a very different person. It was a very exciting time, and my whole world was changing. Now I'm looking back, and hoping I can still offer something. Still do good work.
I met my husband at 15, got married at 19, got pregnant a year later and then had three children after that.
I think I was very lucky that I didn't get well-known until my early thirties. If it had happened when I was younger, you might have seen me falling out of nightclubs. I think I conducted myself as a much better human being because I was already married when all that came along (I got married five months after I got the role as Will).
I'm not saying I'm proud of the fact I had a long affair with a married man, but it did help my business. By the time I married and had children I had the business under my belt.
Once I got married and had kids, I moved away from romantic roles, because it seemed wrong to have my three-year-old wondering why Daddy was kissing someone else.
The most unacknowledged spending expectation among women is the amount of time spent by single mothers caring for children, not only physically, but psychologically. It is my feeling that only a small percentage of a mother's time is normally compensated for by child support, given what a woman could make adding these hours to workforce hours. It is why women who have never been married and never had children earn so much more in the workplace than women who have had children.
I wrote three books, I had three greenhouses. It seemed to me to be very satisfactory.
Before I married, I had three theories about raising children and no children. Now, I have three children and no theories.
My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.