I hope telling stories though 'Making a Difference' - as in my academic work and nonprofit work - will help me to live my grandmother's adage of 'Life is not about what happens to you but about what you do with what happens to you.'

People see I am a mother and head of a household. Today in Chile one-third of households are run by women. They wake up take the children to school go to work. To them I am hope.

In between films I like to travel and hope to visit every continent before I become a mother.

Hope... is the companion of power and the mother of success for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful but not in a cute festive way. More in a life-threatening way that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers If I belittle dogs and mothers.

My mother was one of seven girls whose parents went to bed hungry so their children wouldn't. My father lost his mother when he was nine. He left school and went to work for the next 70 years. They emigrated to America with little more than the hope of a better life.

What greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter?

All that I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother.

To the former child migrants who came to Australia from a home far away led to believe this land would be a new beginning when only to find it was not a beginning but an end an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise and we are sorry.