It's really hard juggling, trying to carve out a time to have a family and be a mom and have a career, especially a creative career.

I've been a pretty selfish mom and a very unselfish athlete for about three years now and it's time to put my family first. It's probably time to move on.

I have a ton of cousins on my mom's side of the family, and we would put on shows together all the time and put on costumes, and we even charged our parents money.

We go to church on Sunday and then have family dinner. My mom usually cooks, and most of the time, it's protein and something else. She will ask us kids what we want!

When I was 15, Dad left the family for good. I didn't want to believe it at the time, but the fact was that he deserted us kids and abandoned Mom after 25 years of marriage.

My biggest project right now is trying to be a really great mom and learning how to balance family and career. I'm just trying to spend as much time with my family as I can.

My first time coming over to North America was to New York around Christmastime when I was 7. My mom was a flight attendant, and she got put on to the Trans-Atlantic route over Christmastime, so she brought the whole family.

I remember the first time seeing myself on TV, when my family was watching the documentary 'Eyes on the Prize' for the first time. There were pictures of people going up the school stairs, and Mom said, 'Oh, that's you!' I said, 'I can't believe this. This is important.'

Too often, tributes to the home-cooked meal assume every family has a schedule that gets everyone home by 5:30 P.M. And too many recipes treat cooking as a solitary pursuit that requires the cook - still most often Mom - to take time away from other family interactions and chores.

When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she was having coffee in the middle of the afternoon with her three sisters. And they would talk about men. I absorbed a lot of that.

Boxing is individual, although there's a team concept because you need a great corner, you need a great trainer, you need a great prep man, you need all of these things, but it's more of a Mano a Mano; it's more you versus me. I miss that time in training camp and Dad and Mom cooking meals. It was one big family.

Every time I go back to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to wait for my test results, and I wonder if I've relapsed or if I'm doing okay, I don't think about my company. I'm proud of everything we've done, but at the end of the day, it comes back to family. I'm still a wife, a mom, a sister - all of those things.

My parents told me from the time I can remember that, 'Yeah, you're adopted. But this is your family.' I can remember my mom, she tells me this story: when I was little, I was looking at her, and I was like, 'Why isn't my skin the same color as yours?' She was like, 'Oh, you're adopted, but I wish I had pretty brown skin like you.'

I was awful my first time. I was so shy eating in front of people. It was so awkward. But my next contest, I brought a bunch of my family out, and I won that one. I remember I almost barfed because my mom, at the end of the contest, she yelled out, 'Do it for Mama!' Everybody laughed. It was one of the closest I've ever been to barfing.

I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan. I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet: 'Gays are worthy of death.'

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