<p>American journalist, author, and TV personality, Anderson Cooper is extremely protective of his mom. Cooper has reported from many of the world’s most dangerous places, and while his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, would never prevent him from doing so, he still doesn’t want her to worry. As he noted in an essay for <em>Good Housekeeping</em> in 2011, “My mom has had to say goodbye to me an awful lot. I can’t remember how many times I’ve called her on the way to the airport trying to figure out the best way to tell her I’m flying into some war zone.” Sometimes he sugarcoats the truth, just a little. During an appearance on <em>The View</em>, Cooper said, “I’ll call her and be like ‘Everything’s fine. You know on TV it always looks worse than it really is.’ I always just say, ‘I’m staying at the hotel today,’ [when] I’m not even in a hotel, but you know.” It’s not that his mom <em>needs </em>protecting; Cooper knows how tough she is. Vanderbilt is a Manhattan socialite, former denim designer, and the great-great-granddaughter of railroad and shipping mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt. She became a <a href="https://esme.com/voices/perspectives/whats-a-solo-mom" target="_blank" class="wordlink">Solo Mom</a> when her famous son was 10 years old: Anderson’s father, the writer Wyatt Emory Cooper, died during open-heart surgery. The death hit him hard, and in those first years after, he sometimes wished his mother were more conventional. But even then he recognized and appreciated his mother’s resilience. He recently told ABC News that she is “the coolest person I know.” As he remembered in the <em>Good Housekeeping</em> essay, “She’d . . . experienced tremendous loss and failure, but was never done in or overcome by it. Instead, she’d pick herself up and move forward.” Cooper, who famously will not receive any of his mother’s fortune in inheritance, appreciates Vanderbilt for not leaving him with money that could be, as he told <em>US Magazine</em>, an “initiative sucker.” Instead, he says she has always instilled in him a good work ethic. “She opened my eyes to the idea that anything was possible, both good and bad,” he said in <em>Good Housekeeping</em>. “Watching her, I began to imagine what my own life could become.”</p><hr><p><span style="font-size: 11px;">Image via Joe Seer/Shutterstock.com</span></p>
<p>In 1767, seventh president of the United States Andrew Jackson came into life with just one parent; his father died in an accident three weeks before his birth. After her husband’s funeral, Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson moved with baby Andrew and his two older brothers to the house of her sister and brother-in-law; the sister, Jane, was an invalid, and for more than a decade, Elizabeth acted as housekeeper and nurse in exchange for a place to live. Elizabeth died of cholera after nursing sick men on prison ships during the Revolutionary War. According to Jackson, his mother's last words were: “In this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast.” Elizabeth’s wisdom had a profound effect on her youngest son. Years later, after defeating the British at New Orleans in 1815, Jackson reportedly said of her to a group of friends, “Gentlemen, I wish she could have lived to see this day. There never was a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and brave as a lioness. Her last words have been the law of my life.”<br></p><hr><p><span style="font-size: 11px;">Photo credit: Shutterstock.com</span></p>