They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income... Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.

This is the genius of America: dreams fulfilled help others launch new dreams.

It's the moms of this nation - single, married, widowed - who really hold this country together. We're the mothers, we're the wives, we're the grandmothers, we're the big sisters, we're the little sisters, we're the daughters. You know it's true, don't you? You're the ones who always have to do a little more.

I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a 'storybook marriage.' Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer.

You can never predict what kind of tough decisions are going to come in front of a President's desk. But if you can trust they will do the right thing, and maybe the hard thing, and maybe not the popular thing, and if you really want to know how a person will operate, look at how they've lived their life.

We are all children of the same God, and we have to come together to solve our problems and not be fighting so much.

A storybook marriage? No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage.