Linda Lael Miller Quotes

The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce. And I knew then that I was going to have to work my way up and out of that life if I was going to give my daughter a better life and a better future, and that's what I've done.

When I joined 'Essence,' I was a young, single mother. I was 24. I hadn't gone to college. I wasn't making any money at 'Essence' - what was it, $500 a month - and I was struggling. So I was always looking down the road, always hoping for a better, you know, tomorrow.

My mom had not worked a day in her life, and then she woke up when I was 15 and found herself with four children, no job, no money. But she set out and made it all OK for us, and from that, I saw that there's no problem that can't be solved.

After a tumultuous 20-year marriage, my father up and left one day, leaving my mother to raise three boys without the means to do so. And yet somehow she did. At the age of 50, she enrolled in nursing school and became a nurse and worked countless overtime hours and weekend shifts just to give us a fighting chance.

I've seen my mother struggling, everything that she did to raise me and my brothers and my sisters, and I know the anger that she went through.

My mom raised us three boys by herself on welfare. It's not worse than anybody else's life.

Mom raised me all by herself, and although we went through our share of lean years, she always worked hard to make our home warm and welcoming.

I think I'm just like a lot of people who had nothing.

I'm raised by a single mom and didn't have pops around for the most part of my life. And she, by any means necessary, gave me the best opportunities that she knew how to give me.

I came from abject poverty. There was nowhere to go but up.

My mother was a single mom, and most of the women I know are strong.

I admire my mother for being a single mum. It's ridiculously hard.

My dad died when I was three so my mom had to raise four kids on her own, and I think there's a part of me that pulls upon having watched my mom do that our whole lives. She had to make it work.

Mine is a story about a teenage single mother who struggled to keep her young family afloat. It's a story about a young woman who was given a precious opportunity to work her way up in the world. It's a story about resiliency, and sacrifice, and perseverance. And you're damn right it's a true story.

Basically, I was a kid growing up with a single mother in Brooklyn.

My mother is a special story. She went through so much to bring us up, four men at home, especially when our country was going through really difficult times.

I had to fend for myself from the time I was 17 years old. I was a high-school dropout. I wasn't quite living on the streets, but I didn't have a lot of hope.

People in tough times - it doesn't mean they don't have a great attitude.

I was living as a young single mom. I was 19 when I was divorced, and my daughter was a year old, and I waited tables here three to four nights a week for several years while I was trying to support myself and my daughter and the day I got that acceptance at Harvard Law School was an unforgettable day.

We need to help people of all circumstance overcome the things in their life.

God bless my mother - she's long gone now, but she'd work all day and go to school at night. She started out in life as a housekeeper at 15 years old, totally on her own, and she retired as a college professor. But there were some hard times. It's not easy for a woman who's only trying to do the best for her kid but who could never be home.

My mom was essentially a single mother raising three boys. If anyone could have had any reason to give up, it was her. But she didn't, and neither did we.

I knew deep down that I was going to have my little girl, even if I had to raise her on my own, which is what I did.

It would be nice if we redefined what we meant by 'war story.' If you're making $15,000 a year living in a certain area of Portland, trying to make it with three kids and no husband, that's a kind of war.

I was the seventh child in a family of eight siblings. We lost our father very young, and my mother had pretty much single-handedly brought us up.