Her grandmother was a drug dealer. Her mother was a drug addict, and she never knew her father. Nicole had a child at 18 and had to raise the child alone because the father was convicted of murder.

Nicole grew up in extreme circumstances, but she couldn't get past the legal test for a downward departure.

It was left to Nicole to raise her sister and her niece, and she didn't know how to do all of those things.

The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.

I feel like that for some reason, internally, that as a mother that it's possible that my daughter would have graduated and she would be here with us

Dean graduated from California two years ago and went into the Army, ... He's overseas now, and some of my other friends also have joined the military. My mother also got me interested by showing me pictures on the Internet of our soldiers and the conditions in which they are living in the Middle East. Their homes, in many cases, are in ditches and in the sand. I also learned that they really are in need of some of the basic day-to-day items most of us might take for granted, so I thought that would be the most useful thing to pursue.