Carol Vorderman Quotes

I remember my dad took my ice skates. One day I asked my mum: 'Where are my ice skates?' because I loved to skate in the winter. And she said through tears: 'Dad is selling them now… we don't have money for this week.'

My father left the family right after I was born, so my mother was working every single day to support me and my brothers.

I'm the seventh child of George and Leona Douglas, and I don't ever remember a time when my father didn't work two jobs. When my mother was going to the grocery, or going to Mass, or trying to take care of seven kids in a run-down farmhouse.

In California, for so long now, our families have been struggling in this economic environment, and Dianne Feinstein, been in office nearly half a century, is out of touch of what women and families are going through in California.

For a period of 17 years - from the age of 9 until I was 25 years old - my mother never spent a day free from domestic difficulties.

I grew up in a very open-minded family. My father died when I was very little, so my mother was really, really incredibly busy trying to provide for us.

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.

My dad died in 1980, and I found out afterwards from mum that my piano lessons, which cost £2 a week, took up nearly a third of his income.

My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies.

When I was very small, the electricity was turned off because we didn't pay the bill. I remember sitting by the oil lamp listening to my mother playing 'Careless Love' on the piano.

My family were very poor. I am one of nine siblings: two girls and seven boys. Only my brother and I play in Europe, and then three more work in Europe, and another plays in Tunisia. This family is a footballing family, but our lives have not always been good.

When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children - me, my five brothers, and three sisters - could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.

My mother graduated from high school in 1969, and on January 3, 1971, she gave birth to me. She was married later that year, but by the time I was 10, she was a divorced single mother of two young boys. To make ends meet, we moved in with my grandparents, who were also housing two of my mother's siblings and their kids.

Mum obviously did not earn much money to feed me and my siblings. She worked hard to raise us, but there was always something missing.

We were not rich by any means. My dad was a plasterer and worked long hours - I hardly ever saw him when I was growing up. He had always gone to work before I woke up, and usually, I would be in bed before he came home.

I was just a toddler when my dad died in a car crash. With my mum, Eunice, being a young widow with a large family, she really struggled money-wise.

I grew up kind of rough, without very much. So, I just want to work as hard as I can so my kids won't have to go through what I did.

I don't wish homelessness on anyone, especially when you come from where your parents work hard.

I didn't get to train because I was raised by a single mom. There were three of us and it was just too expensive to pay for me to do martial arts practice.

I'm an only child and grew up in a bad neighborhood. My parents weren't well-off, but they would save up to get me video games. Games were something I did because I couldn't really go outside where bad things were going on.

We didn't have a whole lot of cash growing up. My mom was a single parent for a while before my stepdad came into the picture.

My parents were very strapped for cash when we were growing up.

I come from a humble background, where my family was struggling to be called middle class.

My dad, grew up poor in a copper-mining town in Arizona. The eleventh of 15 children, he learned to be resourceful and entrepreneurial at a young age, shining shoes at local bars and starting his own pinata business at the tender age of twelve.

Because I grew up in a single parent home with my mom, growing up, things weren't always the best.