From @SenatorShaheen and Angelina Jolie: Here’s how to ensure Afghan women are protected after the U.S. withdrawal https://t.co/pqpXZNc7qw

— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) May 13, 2021

Angelina Jolie: Why children suffer more violence amid COVID-19 https://t.co/d6CGoejPy0 (via @latimesopinion)

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 12, 2020

"I’ve had my own loss and seen my life take a different direction. And it hurt more than I imagined it ever would.

“Her family is broken and she is in agony.  Her children are recovering from the events that brought about the filing.”

"We’re all just healing from the events that led to the filing . . . They’re not healing from divorce. They’re healing from some . . . from life, from things in life.”

“It’s just been the hardest time, and we’re just kind of coming up for air. [The DeMille] is a big jump forward for us, and we’re all trying to do our best to heal our family.”

"My whole family… we’ve all been through a difficult time. "

“None of it’s easy. It’s very, very difficult, a very painful situation, and I just want my family healthy.”

"I don't like [being single]. It's not something I wanted...there’s just nothing nice about it. It’s just hard."

"I now know what it’s like to be alone and to wrap my coat around those I love. And I know the overwhelming sense of gratitude at being strong enough to keep them safe and warm. When your children come into your life, they immediately and forever come first."

"I've spent most of my days just taking care of the children. I will eventually balance more and do more work but because of family issues it's been extremely tough."

"We are and forever will be a family. I am coping with finding a way through to make sure that this somehow makes us stronger and closer."

"I am a big believer that we have to make mistakes in life and learn from them. And that we are who we are because of all the things we have done right and wrong. We grow."

"I think it is not said enough how much we need the men in our lives to be strong and capable and the best they can be."

"It is a lovely thing to discover that your children don’t want you perfect. They just want you honest. And doing your best."

"But now, with my girls growing up and being the ages I remember so well as a daughter, I am rediscovering my mother and her spirit. She was a girl who danced all night on the Sunset Strip and loved rock 'n' roll. She was a woman who loved, even after loss, and never lost her grace and her smile."

"The real truest love pulls out your best self. It's what you value, what you're loyal to and what you're willing to fight for."

"Sometimes you get hurt, you see those you love in pain, and you can’t be as free and open as your spirit desires."

"I wear perfume every day... It's nice for a woman to have a scent that her lover remembers, who identifies it with her.”

"Strong women love and learn from men."

"We care for each other and care about our family, and we are both working towards the same goal."

"I'm unsure of the future, but I'm not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me. And will share their burdens, as they share mine. I will live, and love."

"This #MothersDay I think of refugee mothers I have met," writes Angelina Jolie. "Through them, I’ve come to believe that a mother is the strongest person on earth. The softness of her skin is deceptive. She is a force driven by love and loyalty." https://t.co/rkUaRpYn1s

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) May 9, 2020

Marcheline Bertrand with her husband Jon Voight and son James in 1975, when she was pregnant with daughter Angelina Jolie.  Credit...Angelina Jolie
This year, I’m remembering my mom’s spirit, and the power of so many women I’ve met around the world.

Mother’s Day is hard for anyone who has lost their mom, but this year must be particularly so because of coronavirus. So many people have lost a parent suddenly, without being by their side, able to care for them and return their love in the way they’d always imagined.

I lost my mother in my thirties. When I look back to that time, I can see how much her death changed me. It was not sudden, but so much shifted inside. Losing a mother’s love and warm, soft embrace is like having someone rip away a protective blanket.

I got a small tattoo on my right hand after my mother died, knowing that hand tattoos fade. It looks to others like a letter “m.” But it wasn’t an “m” for Marcheline, her name. It was a “w” for “Winter” — the Rolling Stones song she sang to me as a baby, and that I remember loving as a little girl. “It sure been a cold, cold winter,” she would sing to me. And at the line, “I wanna wrap my coat around you,” she would wrap me up in my blankets and snuggle me.

I loved my mom. She was raised Catholic on the South Side of Chicago. My grandfather, who fought in World War II, loved bowling, M*A*S*H, Benny Hill and my grandmother, Lois. My grandmother died before I was born, when my mother was in her twenties. “Diamond Lois,” my mother’s boyfriend called her. Not because she was a socialite but because she scrubbed the floor in her diamonds. Before my grandparents moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, they ran a bowling alley. Their parents before them ran a bar.

She loved to feel alive. She loved to laugh. When I was down, she would break out those rock songs and remind me of the fire within. One of my early memories is of her lighting candles and placing Beatles albums around the house the night John Lennon was killed. The other time I recall her being worried about a public figure’s health was when Pope John Paul II was shot.

Losing her mother made her deeply sad. When my father had an affair, it changed her life. It set her dream of family life ablaze. But she still loved being a mother. Her dreams of being an actor faded as she found herself, at the age of 26, raising two children with a famous ex who would cast a long shadow on her life. After she died, I found a video of her acting in a short film. She was good. It was all possible for her.

Before her death, she told me that dreams can simply change shape. Her dream to be an artist was in fact her mother’s dream. And later she hoped it would be mine. I think of how true that must be for so many women before us, whose dreams have taken generations to realize.

Listening to “Winter” now, I realize how lonely and afraid my mother must have been, but also how determined she was to fight to make sure her children were all right. As the “w” faded on my hand, so did that feeling of home and protection. Life has taken many turns. I’ve had my own loss and seen my life take a different direction. And it hurt more than I imagined it ever would.

But now, with my girls growing up and being the ages I remember so well as a daughter, I am rediscovering my mother and her spirit. She was a girl who danced all night on the Sunset Strip and loved rock 'n' roll. She was a woman who loved, even after loss, and never lost her grace and her smile.

I now know what it’s like to be alone and to wrap my coat around those I love. And I know the overwhelming sense of gratitude at being strong enough to keep them safe and warm. When your children come into your life, they immediately and forever come first.

This Mother’s Day, I think of refugee mothers I have met, living in poverty and displacement. Every one began her journey of motherhood with a promise to do all she could to protect her child. To lay down her life if necessary. And if she is defeated and silenced, few things are more tragic.

Through refugees, I’ve come to believe that a mother is the strongest person on earth. The softness of her skin is deceptive. She is a force driven by love and loyalty. There is no one who solves more problems. When she has only love to give, it pours from her soul.

When a mother comes to you for help and you do not provide it, she may weep. But she will never give up. When you deny her child safety and shelter, she may seek it in a hostile land where her body is vulnerable to abuse. Her heart will be sick with loss. But she will fight on for her child. Because she is a mother.

Women who are abused aren’t “weak women,” they are often mothers. They are often trying to manage danger with no way out. They will stand between their child and harm. They will face isolation and criticism. But their only thought will be: “Hurt me, not my child. Insult and ignore me, not my child. Take away my food, but not my child’s.”

A woman like this will suffer unimaginable pain in war or in a refugee camp, but she will not leave her child and seek another life. She will sit for 10 years, 20 years or more if necessary. I remember all the beautiful faces of the refugee mothers I have met, like pages in a family album. Their eyes full of exhaustion, but never giving up. Because they who were once daughters must now wrap their own child in a blanket.

Nothing is more painful for a mother or father than to be unable to provide their child with the things they need. This is a reality many more families are facing during this pandemic, even in America. But I have learned that when children know how much you love them, sometimes that understanding counts for more than the thing itself. And when they grow up, knowing that you never abandoned them, or left them in an unsafe situation, or ever stopped fighting for them, will be what counts.

So to the mothers everywhere who feel helpless — yet who still give every last bit of energy, every last bite of food and the only blanket to their children — I honor you.

And to anyone who is grieving this Mother’s Day, I hope you will find consolation and strength in your memories.

Angelina Jolie is a filmmaker and special envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

"It is a lovely thing to discover that your children don’t want you perfect. They just want you honest," writes Angelina Jolie https://t.co/DHLpb94m8Z

— TIME (@TIME) April 24, 2020

TIME contributing editor Angelina Jolie guest-edited a special edition of TIME’s Parents newsletter. Sign up to read it and get weekly parenting tips and links.

Dear Parents,
I am thinking of you. I am imagining how hard each of you is trying to get through your days. How much you want to lead your loved ones through this. How you worry. How you plan. How you smile for them, when inside you feel at times you are breaking.
I was not a very stable youth. In fact, I never thought I could be anyone’s mom. I remember the decision to become a parent. It wasn’t hard to love. It wasn’t hard to dedicate myself to someone and something greater than my life. What was hard was knowing that from now on I needed to be the one to make sure everything was okay. To manage it and make it work. From food to school to medical. Whatever would come. And to be patient.
I realized I stopped my constant daydreaming, instead staying always ready for any break into what I was doing or thinking to answer a need. It was a new skill to acquire.
So now, in the midst of this pandemic, I think of all the mothers and fathers with children at home. All hoping they can do everything right, answer all needs, and stay calm and positive.
One thing that has helped me is to know that’s impossible.
It is a lovely thing to discover that your children don’t want you perfect. They just want you honest. And doing your best. In fact, the more room they have to be great where you are weak, the stronger they may become. They love you. They want to help you. So in the end, it’s the team you build. And in a way, they are raising you up too. You grow together.

—

MORE STORIES
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the coronavirus pandemic is a “human crisis that is fast becoming a human rights crisis.”
Earlier in April, I took a look at how the secondary impacts of the Coronavirus crisis are putting kids around the world at risk.
How will the coronavirus pandemic affect the Syrian refugee crisis?
In refugee camps, social distancing isn’t possible, and there’s often little capacity for intensive medical care.

Angelina Jolie talks to Mariane Pearl about overcoming trauma and the search for truth https://t.co/9BNYSbOjHZ

— TIME (@TIME) April 14, 2020

I rang you as soon as I heard the news that a Court in Pakistan had overturned the convictions of the four men accused of killing Danny, finding them guilty of kidnapping but not murder. The men were later rearrested. You spoke instead about people in Spain—where you live—suffering in hospital without their families. It said a lot to me that you were thinking of others. Could you share your thoughts on the Court’s decision?
The facts are clear and those responsible for Danny’s death belong in prison. The other day, Adam’s honorary godfather called me from Pakistan. He wanted to share that everyone in both his professional and private surroundings was outraged by the attempt to reverse Omar Sheikh’s sentence. That means everything to me. When I left Pakistan pregnant with Adam, hundreds of Pakistani citizens wrote to me, adding their names and contacts so I could see that they didn’t fear reprisal for supporting us. I am not interested in revenge on terrorists’ terms. What matters most is how other people react, that is where we have a margin to grow as a world: each individual’s sense of integrity is our collective source of hope.

Can you speak a little more about that?
Terrorism would have won if I had lost my faith in mankind but the opposite happened. I believe even more in people’s potential to remain dignified and empathetic and I believe in people who strive for justice and the greater good. The more they hate the more I love, the more they spread fear the more I spread hope. Meanwhile, Adam embraces life, and Sheikh was never able to claim Danny’s legacy. Adam wants to study physics and philosophy. He’s also a talented guitar player and graphic artist who is teaching himself Arabic. He’s going to Harvard. We have won this war, me and all those like you who have helped him grow. P.S. I’ve told Adam that I am embarrassing him, but it’s all your fault. He said okay.

I remember, like it was yesterday, Maddox and Adam sitting in your apartment in New York watching the Jungle Book while we were trying to make pasta. And now they are college students. I often think about the fact that when you lost Danny, you were pregnant with Adam. Was there a promise you made to yourself or to him that got you through?
When we got married Danny wrote a marriage vow that read: “Turn our lives into a work of literature”. After he passed away, I understood what he really meant beyond the romantic thought itself. I promised him to honor our narrative of peace and understanding. I promised to keep listening to Led Zeppelin in the mornings. And that I would fight back every time despair and pain lodged in my head, advising me to give up on myself and others. I promised to keep exploring the human race and through storytelling, shine a light on people who are both the opposite and the antidotes to terror. As for Adam, when he was born my first thought was a promise: that I would guard his integrity and freedom as fiercely as one of those sculpted two-headed, fire-spitting lions that adorn the entrance of our building.

How do you talk to children about hard realities?
 I believe in taking children seriously while respecting their rights to be children. In my own family, my father’s suicide remained a secret until I was 17. As a teenager, I knew he didn’t just die by accident as I was told, and that was very scary. When I discovered his suicide note, it was an odd but powerful relief. When I found out, we still were not allowed to talk about him though. I believe proper communication would have spared me a lot of angst. Children don’t belong to anybody but themselves and they are entitled to their realities.

Every situation and trauma is different. Do you have any advice or reflections for people who are going through so much at this time? 
 It’s very difficult to give advice in general because pain is so specific. Hardships tend to shape people’s lives, and it’s our work as human beings to give them significance and to clarify what it is that we have come into this world for.

Danny was someone who devoted his life to the search for truth. Did you and he share the same view about journalism? Do you still have the same faith?
I do believe in journalism. My faith has never wavered. That is not to say that we don’t have serious problems with it today, ranging from economics to systemic assaults on truth. But ethics was our cement and still is to me.

You’ve written about how easy it is for terrorists to manipulate the media. Is this still a concern?
We are very predictable. That is why criminals perform their deeds in time for the evening news. The rush for attention-grabbing headlines reflects the economic model a lot of people work under. They’re in it for the cause, but they stumble inside the profit-making machine. For a long time, journalists were happy asking everyone questions but themselves. News was that straightforward. Nowadays, journalism is only as good as the willingness of those who practice it to be honest when they ask themselves who or what they’re in it for.

I respect the work you do training women journalists with your Women-Bylines initiative. Could you tell me what drives you in this?
The traditional media has easily overwritten the female gender until now. I find that the most exciting and promising event of our generation is the end of that era, which started with mankind itself. Today, we are still raped as a weapon of war or held as sexual slaves or we endure discriminations from another age. We also have three jobs and raise our kids alone. In Africa, the Middle East, and all over the continents and across cultures, women stand for justice—refusing to be married off as children, mutilated, deprived of land rights, or held back by countless of discriminative laws. They are insisting on being part of the equation for the greater good.

And they are taking a lead?
Yes, and to me, this is so interesting because it’s an emerging leadership of people who have never known power. If you don’t have power, you are not afraid to lose it. When you have endured how abuse of power translates into your family or community’s lives, you have no desire for it. Instead, you understand how humans operate and take it from there.

With travel coming to a halt due to the virus, there will be much more focus on local journalists and photographers.
There are excellent trained journalists in most of the places foreign correspondents used to cover. I remember discussing this with Danny. It feels completely wrong that people who have the knowledge of a place or situation and the right address books were just used as “fixers.” Danny agreed with me, even though that thought seriously threatened his job.

How do you reflect this in your work?
I try to combine the two: The rise of women and the recognition that people were entitled to report about their own lands. I am a cofounder of a new media project called Meteor that focuses on quality journalism and women. Women-Bylines is one part of it, a series of workshops worldwide to produce films and multimedia by and about women. If you give women a voice, they are going to use it and if they use it, it will be for justice.

We all fall short but is there a philosophy you try to live by?
Do you remember the last words in my book? They’re from Diane Ackerman:
“I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.”

"Everyone wants to see peace in Afghanistan. But peace gained at the price of the rights of women is no peace at all, just conflict and oppression by different means," writes Angelina Jolie for @CNNopinion https://t.co/thBsfEOjbn

— CNN (@CNN) March 9, 2020

Throughout International Women's Day, my thoughts have been with the women of Afghanistan whose hard-won rights and freedom are hanging in the balance. Just days ago, an agreement was signed between the government of the United States and the Taliban that was reached without the inclusion of women, made no mention of women's rights under the Afghan constitution, and contained no commitments to protecting those rights in the intra-Afghan negotiations that are to come.

Everyone wants to see peace in Afghanistan. But peace gained at the price of the rights of women is no peace at all, just conflict and oppression by different means. It would be a betrayal of the huge sacrifices made by the Afghan people and security forces, and by many brave international servicemen and women.

All governments, starting with ours in the United States, should insist on the full inclusion of women in the next stage of the negotiations, and make clear that they will not support a peace agreement that undermines Afghan women's rights under the constitution or calls into question the country's democratic institutions.

When the 24 hours we've set aside to honor women comes to an end, we must continue to press the administration to honor its promise to protect Afghan women during the negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban scheduled for later this month.

I hope that everyone who considers themselves part of the international women's rights movement will show their solidarity and support for Afghan women — as well as women of all other countries where rights are lacking or under threat — and help ensure that their voices can never be silenced. Countless Afghan women have risked — and lost — their lives to win greater freedom for their countrymen and women. They must not be forgotten or left to stand alone during this crucial period in their country's history.

Angelina Jolie: The Cost of Inaction in Syria is Too High https://t.co/UrM7NWpJd7

— TIMEWorld (@TIMEWorld) February 20, 2020

The U.N. Security Council just passed what critics are calling a weakened resolution on sexual violence in conflicts.

Yesterday, German foreign minister Heiko Maas and Angelina Jolie wrote an op-ed on the original resolution: https://t.co/hD9RVmmH6C

— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) April 23, 2019

Angelina Jolie and Amal Clooney speak at the UN is support of a new United Nations Security Council resolution that includes a mechanism to investigate sexual violence as a weapon of war https://t.co/7BG4jHKVRt pic.twitter.com/hCd2KZy2po

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) April 23, 2019

Teaming up for the protection of women in wars and conflicts: @HeikoMaas and Angelina Jolie in the @washingtonpost on how to better support victims of sexual violence. 🇩🇪 will be proposing a resolution at the #UNSC. #strongerUNited #GERinUNSC @GermanyUN https://t.co/Vmqw1HZqcc

— GermanForeignOffice (@GermanyDiplo) April 22, 2019