Twins are a high-risk pregnancy, by definition. The quieter I am, the longer I can keep them growing.

I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news, but in hindsight, I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.

In the beginning when I sat next to Tom Brokaw on the 'Today' show, the stories I was interested in were those having to do with women and children and learning and health. In those days, 25 to 30 years ago, that was called soft news, and not in a nice way.

I'm not driven by killer ambition. I'm not a workaholic. I'm a good team player. I don't have to be captain, but I do want to play on a winning team.

The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.

I wanted to be at my sister's funeral, but my family has always had a complicated dynamic.

Years go by, but the heart of what we all fight and die for at the core is the same. We fight and die for love and our family and our land and for what's ours. We do things for something as simple as pride.

Not a lot of people know it, but I don't have any qualms about saying it - there's a lot of mental illness that runs in my family.