All of our schools should be good enough to attract a healthy racial mix, which, I believe, leads to the most effective learning for everybody.

I remember what it was like at age 6, not really understanding what was going on around me, but having all these grown-up thoughts running through my head about what I was facing, why this was happening.

Every day, I would show up, and there were no kids, just me and my teacher in my classroom. Every day, I would be escorted by marshals past a mob of people protesting and boycotting the school. This went on for a whole year.

It's time to get past our racial differences. We owe it to our children to help them keep their clean start.

I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me, nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.

I'm certainly not a perfect mother, but I'm trying to be what my mother wasn't for me. My mother's battled depression, so I understand it now as a parent, some of the things that she must have been going through.

The only reason I got married in 2003 was for my children. I had a therapist who said marriage is really a container for a family, and that made sense to me.

I am insanely superstitious. All the woman in my family are, beginning with my grandmother, who would leave red ribbons under the beds and taught us how to find four-leaf clovers.