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.

The secret to a happy marriage is a sense of humor, because marriage throws you curveballs. It is not easy.

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.

We're too smart to know there aren't easy answers. But we're not dumb enough to accept that there aren't better answers.

Mitt doesn't like to talk about how he has helped others because he sees it as a privilege, not a political talking point.

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.

You can never ask God to tell you what the end is. You can ask, "Is this a good thing to do?" But not, "How is this going to turn out?" That answer you will never get.