You Should Meet My Mother

Maria Shriver thinks her mother would have made a great chief of staff. Mika Brzezinski’s mom could skin a deer. Tory Burch thought hers was the chicest woman in the world. And Liz Smith’s mama once watched a porn film with her son. To celebrate Mother’s Day, The Daily Beast asked some successful daughters about the women who made them the women they are.

Alexandra Pelosi
Documentary Filmmaker, Journalist, and Writer

My mom was a real homemaker—she made Halloween costumes and baked cookies and drove carpool. But when we were at school, she went to the California Democratic Party to volunteer. MORE>>

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Barbara Walters
Co-host, The View, Author of Audition

We think we are so different from our mothers and then when we have our own daughters, we find that we really are not so different after all. MORE >>

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Kirsten Gillibrand
United States Senator for New York

I love celebrating Mother’s Day. Since I was a kid, it was a special day to tell my mother and grandmother how much I love them. Now that I’m a Mom, it is a special day to spend with my children. MORE >>

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Tory Burch
Fashion Designer

My mother, Reva, is my biggest inspiration. I grew up on a farm with three brothers and was a total tomboy. I was much more interested in riding horses and climbing trees than in fashion. MORE >>

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Molly Sims
Model and Actress

My mom is the most positive person I know. She has the innate ability to twist a bad situation into a good one. MORE>>

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Liz Smith
Journalist and Gossip Columnist

My mother was sweet, kind and gentle, a regular Hallmark greeting card kind of mom. She had been a quintessential Mississippi belle. MORE >>

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Maria Shriver
First Lady of California

I was raised by a woman who, I think, felt that had she been born at a different time, her life might have been different. MORE >>

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Mika Brzezinski
Co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe

The "liberal elite" upbringing that Joe Scarborough jabs me about on our show starts and ends with my mother. Her tough Eastern European roots and her career as a sculptor working with two-ton pieces of wood and a chainsaw kind of breaks that image. MORE >>

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Lynn Sherr
Former ABC News Correspondent

On Mother’s Day I smell lilacs, because every May when the holiday rolled around, our family drove out to the Pennsylvania countryside where the lilacs had just burst into bloom, and where we would gather up as many of the splendid blooms as would fit into the metal buckets we’d brought along, wrapping them into moist newspaper cones for the hour-long drive home to Philadelphia. MORE >>

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Dorothy Bush Koch
Author, My Father, My President: A Personal Account of the Life of George H.W. Bush

There are so many things I admire about my mother. First of all, she is a great historian. She chronicled her over 64 remarkable years with my dad, and the life of our whole family, every day in big, brown scrapbooks that now occupy many shelves at the George
H. W. Bush Library.   MORE >>

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Mary Matalin
Former Assistant to President George W. Bush, Author of Letters to My Daughters

When my mother died, way too young and unexpectedly, my father told me her singular joy was her kids. Ironically, when you are loved like that, it remains undetected until it disappears. MORE >>