Janine di Giovanni

It is a well known urban myth that the French don't trust banks and store their money under their mattress. It's not that they are tight with money - they just don't trust anyone.

My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.

Even as a small child, I wondered why the Dominican nuns who educated me were subservient to the Jesuit priests who educated my brothers.

Sibling rivalry was, and still is to this day, rampant in my family. We were all competing for my parents' divided attention.

My mother came from a generation that did not want nannies. She had her first child at 24 and her last - me - at 42.

Little changes can start to make a difference in the world.

It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.

Full disclosure: I went to university as an eager young feminist for many reasons - to get away from my parents, to soak up literature and knowledge, to cease being a child, to expand my mind and my world.

Human memory is short and terribly fickle.

The pope is an intelligent man and realizes that time marches on. He says the Church has a long way to go in developing a real strategy that integrates women - but clearly he is baffled as to how to do it.

From the earliest age, I was just different. I think that's part of every writer's little revenge. You think, 'I'm not a blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader but I'm going to get out of here and do something.'

Every time I went to the doctor when I was in my twenties, he repeated the same thing to me: don't wait too long to have children.