My mom's never been married. I've never even seen my mom kiss a dude.

If you would ask my mom what books I liked growing up, I liked Dr. Seuss.

I was born and raised in East Los Angeles by a single mom who had three biological kids and adopted four more. I never met my dad.

When I got into junior high school, that's when my mom let me dress how I wanted to dress. Up to that point I wore suits to school all the time.

I remember when I was 11, I told my mom, 'One day I'm going to buy you a house.' And she said, 'Boy, don't you be making promises you can't keep.' I was like: 'No, Ma, it's not a promise. I'm going to buy you a house one day.'

These days it's cool to be ethnic and to be different, but when I was a kid, it was not cool - at all. My friends would come over and my mom would make crepes with eggs, stuffed with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and spinach. And they'd be like, 'What is this?'

Every time I think I have something under control, it changes and I don't have it under control. I think it takes several years to get there. Jade is 19 months old, so right now I'm on alert all the time. And as a mom I think you're constantly worrying about things.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

I must admit, even though I'm the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I'm going to check Mom's genealogy.

I didn't know my Dad - he moved out early. And my mom's politics were kind of hardscrabble. She didn't think about Democrats or Republicans. She thought about who made sense. I've been both in my life.