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Loretta Lynn was a great example for me of a woman who was an award-winning, in-demand entertainment business success story and a loving wife and mother.

Lucille Ball taught me that the best comedy need never be cruel to be funny. She also schooled me on the benefits of good lighting for the female face.

From Pearl Bailey, I learned that giving one’s time and energy (she was an ambassador to the United Nations) enriches your performance through life experience.

From Tina Turner, I learned to let the music be an expression of strength and joy.

I could name hundreds more women in all aspects of show business who have graced my life with their groundbreaking individual style and insights into what is, more often than not, a tough career path. There are a few common traits, though. They usually have an intuitive trust in their talent and the personal quality of endurance that gives them the courage and the drive to put themselves out there before the public eye. You have to have that drive because it overrides any lack of confidence. As Minnie Pearl said, “It’s the most unglamorous glamour business in the world.” She was right. What may appear to many to be a charmed life can also be isolating, emotionally battering, invasive, exhausting, and risky.

Of course, there are incredible rewards, as well. It’s an
amazing feeling to be appreciated for what you do and to feel like you have brought happiness to others. I was fortunate that I could observe, in action, some of the best examples of women performers who actually managed to do it successfully.

One woman, though, stands alone as the star who most influenced my life both professionally and personally.

She was the constant light that I could follow without ever fearing I would fall. She was the star who could lead the whole show, but who never took a bow. She never sought the spotlight; but her inner radiance was visible to all who took the time to observe her. In a culture that recognizes a star’s power through awards and bigger paychecks, she had neither. She didn’t need them. She understood the importance of the part she played in this life. She was never interviewed about an upcoming role, live performance, or album, but the way she acted and the words she spoke made her the perfect role model for me and, I know, for thousands of others. I learned by her example and I succeeded because of her belief in me.

Her last name is on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but not her first. Her first name comes from the ancient Hebrew word
shemesh
, meaning “to be brilliant.” As time has passed, I comprehend on a deeper and deeper level how “brilliant” she was. I was named for her, and I pray, every day, that my life will honor that name. She was, is, and will always be my guiding star. She’s my mother, Olive Osmond.

For years, I’ve had a deep and continuous feeling that, as her only daughter, I needed to write down at least some of the countless ways she embodied womanhood and especially motherhood, not only for my brothers and me, but as a woman
who truly understood the crucial importance of “mothering” all of God’s children, wherever she met them and no matter what their age. She knew the immense importance of her walk in this life as a daughter of a loving God and as a loving mother.

My mother’s influence is the core of how I parent my own children and, on a broader scale, how I hope to interact with all my family members, my friends, my fans, and every daily encounter along the way. My mother’s philosophy for how to approach every interaction, experience, challenge, and choice in every single day was this: “The key is love.” She would always, first, strive to “be positive” and, second, to always be kind. If her kindness was rejected for any reason, my mother’s solution was to put forth even more kindness.

I know my daily approach to mothering isn’t as consistent or as wise as my mom’s, but I also know that she would have been the first one to respond to my shortcomings with kindness and some positive words of encouragement. She was always ready with a positive thought for anyone she would talk to, a thought that would always move us forward in our thinking.

I’m known for saying, “If you’re going to laugh about it in the future, you might as well laugh about it now.” I even used that phrase for the title of my last book. Like my mother, I believe in a positive outlook on life, but when it comes to motherhood, I feel it’s crucial to grasp the seriousness of the long-lasting and far-reaching effects we have on the future through how we nurture our children today. I know it’s the single most important “calling” on this earth. A mother is a child’s first teacher. We are raising the people who will grow up to influence society and the world. As women, whether we have children
or not, we “bear” the future by being the nucleus of the home.

There isn’t a challenge or a reward in the whole entertainment world that even comes close to the challenges and rewards of motherhood.

My mother’s generation of women counseled and advised one another over the backyard fence, or in the halls of their church, or at the school bake sale. Considering that 77 percent of women today work outside of the home and more than 30 percent of American homes are headed by single moms, like my own was for four years, we don’t really have the opportunities or the time to talk with one another face-to-face anymore. That’s why I want to put on the page some of my own mother’s best advice, some of which she noted in her journals, some of which came from her own mother. I noted much of it in my journals over the years. I’m including my own stories of being a mom: the delights, the downfalls, and some of the dreams I’ve had that you might share in your own parenting.

My mother was charismatic, powerful, exceptional, and determined, though she was never “famous” in a traditional way. However, her influence, like every mother’s, will live on generation to generation to generation.

I’m writing about my thoughts as a woman and a mother, most of which are thoughts passed down to me from my mother and her mother before her. My hope in sharing them with you is that they will be thoughts that “move us forward.”

Marie Osmond

Thousands of fans called her “Mother Osmond.” Every week she would receive mailbags full of letters from teenagers asking her advice.

I
think I’ll invent an under-eye cover stick for two different times of motherhood.

I would call the makeup “2 Weeks and 192 Months.” It would have incredible camouflaging capabilities to hide the dark circles resulting from the lack of sleep that a mother has when her baby is two weeks old and again when her baby is 192 months old, which is age sixteen.

When your baby is an infant, being up at two in the morning for overnight feedings is simply what you have to do, a parent’s responsibility. You do not have a choice. Your newborn is like an alarm clock going off every two or three hours, day and night, in desperate need of your attention.

When your babies are sixteen, they may not want your attention at all and can go to great lengths to avoid it, but I’ve found that it’s the age when they may need your attention even more.

When your baby is two weeks old, you can’t imagine him ever wanting to be in anyone else’s arms than yours. At 192 months old, about 90 percent of a teenager’s energy goes into
thinking about what other arms he could possibly be in, or whose arms might be ignoring him now. However, I’ve found that asking sixteen-year-olds anything about dating, or whom they might like or who might like them, is pointless anytime before nine p.m. All you’ll get is a two- or three-syllable response: “’S all good” or “Whatever.” Then they will find the nearest exit from the room. If you happen to follow them, they will spin on their heels, throw a stop sign hand in the air, and say, “Mom!!!! Really!” After having four kids go through age sixteen already, I’ve learned not to take this personally.

Like the Cinderella tale, it seems that many sixteen-year-olds don’t come back to reality until after the clock strikes midnight. That seems to be the time of day—or night—when they want to process life out loud. Apparently, teens only like to talk about what’s on their minds when they are out of the glare of sunlight.

As a mother, I’ve found that it was a good idea to be up and around at twelve a.m. when their “fantasy ride” is recognized as a pumpkin, and the handsome coachman turns out to have ratlike personality traits. I try to stay up most weekend nights until at least two a.m., listening to whatever my kids need to talk about. I’ve become more and more nocturnal as more of my kids reached their teen years, mostly so I wouldn’t be out of the loop when it came to their relationships. Whenever I could be nonchalantly nearby (if you can call using eyelash glue to hold your exhausted lids open “nonchalant”) when my dating teenager was trying to make sense of it all, I’d have the best chance to be debriefed.

I’ve had to be the breadwinner for my family for the past twenty-five years, like women in 40 percent of U.S. households; and performing five nights a week in my Las Vegas show with Donny means long evenings outside the home. I know I’m not alone in this; many mothers spend long days away from their children. Those children may be in school or day care or watched at home by another adult, but it still comes down to being away from their mothers’ love and influence. I know I’m also not the only mother who suffers heart-wrenching guilt about it. As we were running for an elevator after a meeting so I could catch a plane home, a business friend said to me, “I understand your life. I drop my three-year-old off at day care at seven a.m. They take him to his preschool and pick him up. By the time I commute back from work to the day care, it’s six fifteen. We get home, eat dinner, I get him in the tub, and he’s asleep by eight. I literally see my child for about ninety minutes a day, and it’s always when he’s tired and I’m tired, too.” The pain in her eyes was one I know well. Often my work takes me out of town for shows or business meetings, speeches and appearances. I’ve tried to make sure that no “travel” job kept me away from my kids for more than seven days. But seven days is a long time in the life of anyone under eighteen. I’ve had to live with knowing that I’ve missed out on many of the teenage life issues that my four older kids experienced. I tried to make up for it, but lost time is just that—lost. Both my heart and mind are so much more at ease now in raising my four younger children, knowing that, since my marriage to Steve in 2011, they now have a dependable and loving father who is there for
everything that is going on in their lives, especially when I can’t be. But it still is painful to me to hear about some of my children’s experiences secondhand. Recently, my fifteen-year-old son was arriving home just as I was leaving for work. In the driveway, he said to me, “I don’t get to see you very much, but it’s okay.” Even the fact that he said it was “okay” cut me to the quick. I hid my tears from him, but I cried all the way to work that night.

When one of my daughters was that age, a friend of hers unknowingly made me feel better. The group had gone to see a movie, and they all came into the house around eleven p.m. to pick up their backpacks and other things they had left behind earlier. I was still up, packing for a trip to QVC for my line of designer dolls. All five of them came and sat on the floor of my bedroom to talk. We talked for over an hour about books, music, and video games and eventually more emotional issues: dating, peer pressure, aspirations, and challenges. Afterward, one of the kids said to me, “This was awesome. Sometimes my parents and I don’t talk for, like, two weeks. And they would never stay up to talk to me. They always say, ‘If it’s after ten p.m., don’t bug us. We’re sleeping.’”

I laughed and said, “Well, I’m sure you don’t feel all that chatty when they are wide-awake at six a.m., either, right?”

I guess I’m naturally a night owl, so even if I’m tired, I can manage to find a second…or even third…wind. It’s from a life of doing shows in the evenings and then needing at least a couple of hours for the showtime adrenaline to calm down. My mother was also a night owl, probably from waiting up for
us to come home from performing or from our dates. Often in her journals she would note when she felt she could safely relax:
“12:50 a.m. Everyone is under one roof, safe and sound. I can go to bed now.”