When I was four years old, my father was a professor at UCLA on sabbatical, teaching at the University of Toulouse in southern France. So my family lived in a tiny village just outside of Toulouse for a year. Back in 1960, the locals had never met anyone from abroad, so they always referred to us as ‘Les Américains.’ Whenever our parents drove us to school, the children would surround our little car and peer into it as if we were the most exciting thing they’d seen all day.

I attended kindergarten that year, initially not speaking a word of French. But the bigger issue for me was that I was so afraid of losing my balance on the ceramic footholds on each side of the outdoor holes that were used for toilets, that my mom had to send me to school every single day with a change of underwear because I always peed in my pants rather than risk falling into the latrine.

My mom had a huge belly that year, but I didn’t really understand what it was about. (Clearly, I hadn’t yet read my book at four years of age.) One particularly cold Saturday morning as we were getting ready to celebrate my oldest brother’s 8th birthday, my mom told him that she was going to go somewhere and bring back a present for him.

No sooner had she said that when there was a knock on the door, and who should arrive but the village doctor, ready to whisk my mother away to the tiny clinic. A few hours later, with the birthday celebration put on hold, my dad took me and my two older brothers to the clinic to meet our new little brother, Raymond. As I excitedly ran ahead to my mom’s room, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of the gorgeous clinic dog, a huge German Shepherd wagging his tail while standing by the side of my mom’s hospital bed, excitedly panting with his drooling muzzle resting on her lap. For a split second there, I thought my mom had given birth to a dog.

In the end, my oldest and youngest brothers were born on the same day, and formed the bookends of the four Weschler kids, exactly 8 years apart. I was the third and only girl, and reluctantly assumed the role of Family Moron at the nightly dinner table, surrounded by my three brilliant brothers. Little did I know that 30 years later, our “petit grenouille” (little frog) who was born in France would end up saving me from myself as I embarked on writing the first edition of Taking Charge of Your Fertility, originally released in 1995. See the last paragraph of my acknowledgements in the book to appreciate why.