My whole career has been trying to please people in basketball. Now it's time to please myself.

It will be exciting to have my child share my career and to remember what I was like when I was young.

On my best days, such as when I was a junior in high school coming off a 42-point performance and near triple-double, my dad was there to tell me I haven't arrived yet and bring me back to reality.

I look at it this way: the WNBA is 13 years young. I think eventually women will get to that point, maybe in my daughter's generation, where their salaries will be similar to men's. But we're still starting off, like, where the NBA was back in the 1950s.

I admire people's marriages, and I think it's a wonderful thing to have, but I don't think it's the only way to live. I think there are many ways to live and many ways to establish intimate support in your life that can be from family or friends or great roommates that you like.

No election is ever just about one issue, but I care a lot about women's rights and making sure parents have what they need to raise healthy kids. I always have cared, but having just had a child, I know how serious it is to be a mother. It's an incredibly huge challenge. You need support. You need resources.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact.