Our son is in school now. You know, he's six-and-a-half and so a big chunk of the day is taken up by school. So I'm hoping that I'll be able to certainly take him to school in the morning, maybe pick him up in the afternoon and come back to work.
Our son is in school now. You know, he's six-and-a-half and so a big chunk of the day is taken up by school. So I'm hoping that I'll be able to certainly take him to school in the morning, maybe pick him up in the afternoon and come back to work
I get up around 8 o'clock, which gives me enough time to walk dogs and feed chickens and horses. Then I get to work in my home office upstairs, and basically, I don't stop until I've written 2,000 words and/or the Stephen Colbert show is over.
I think that the language that we use is a ritual, that my [maternal] grandmother was called "Big Mama" is a ritual, that my daughter calls my father "Baba" and my mother "Mama" is a ritual. There are common African-American rituals that are a part of my experience. If I ever get married some day I would like to jump the broom.
My 13-year-old daughter leaves the house at 7:15 every morning and takes a smelly city bus to school way uptown. It's like 8 degrees out, and it's dark and she's got this morning face and I send her out there to take a bus. Meanwhile, my driver is sitting in a toasty Mercedes that's going to take me to work once both kids are gone. I could send her in the Mercedes and then have it come back to get me, but I can't have my kid doing that. I can't do that to her. Me? I earned that f—ing Mercedes. You better f—ing believe it.
I stagger out of bed, take the dogs outside, and then I'll get a Diet Coke and a couple of dog biscuits and go upstairs. By the time I've consumed my Diet Coke and had a quick run through the morning email and Twitter feed, I will probably be compos mentis enough to work.
Mother would come and pick me up at work and take me wherever I could get a job. Mother didn't trust anybody with me. Usually we'd get home at 3 in the morning.
I feel like I'm a stay-at-home mom, which I was for the five years before this. She's absolutely been my focus. That's the choice I made. Desperate Housewives is perfect for me. I get to go back to work and still be able to take my daughter to school and pick her up.
My first conversation of the day is with my daughter, Nathalie. I call her every morning; it is a ritual.
I get up in the morning, have a job to do, go there, come home, be with the family, that's it.
By the end of high school, I would do shows at the theater at night and then take the train home and go to school the next morning.
I got hooked to American news like a great TV season. It plays like fiction. I would come home from work, and I would put it on, and I would stay up until 2 in the morning watching it and get up in the morning and watch it.
My daughter is a freshman in college and my son is - well, our daughter and our son - is a sophomore in college. So they come home on selected weekends, they come home on vacations and they're home in the summer, although they have jobs.
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it.
This morning when I left Mom's parting words were, "Come straight home after school." Wow! Like I'm going to get stoned at 3:30—it doesn't sound so bad at that.
Half of the days in 2014, I had to confine my daughter to my home like a prisoner because the air quality in Beijing was so poor. One morning, I saw my daughter banging on the window... The day will come when she asks me, 'Why do you keep me here? What is going to hurt me when I go outside?'