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.