There were two things I deeply envied as a child: having a bike of one’s own and being an adopted child.

The older boy next door had a bike that I mooched frequently. Marshall’s bike was too big for me. I could just manage by standing on the pedals. 

Meantime, my best friend, Judy, was living the good life as an adopted, only child. She had a girl’s bike, her own room and more books than she could ever read. She was doted upon but not quite spoiled. On the other hand, I was one of five kiddos — at least four more than our mother had bargained on. Sleepovers with Judy made me envy the luxury of privacy. At my house, somebody would always barge into the bathroom when I was using it. I shared a bed with a sister until I left for college.

Judy’s calm, amazing life made mine look like life in a zoo: noisy, crowded and every secret on public display. She also had Helen, a mother who knew everything worth knowing. A librarian who drove the bookmobile in the summer!

A fantasy took root. Privately, I grew convinced I was switched at birth. All signs pointed to this: Mama was a girly girl. I was a tomboy. She had never been in a fight at school; she scolded me when I arrived home sweaty and bloody-kneed after an incident with the class bully. She adored dolls. I ignored them, though an indifferent Santa brought yet another doll every Christmas.

Mama didn’t like exploring in the woods. She wasn’t into horses. Nor chocolate milk. She didn’t even like Butterfingers!

My life made no sense — unless there had been a mix-up at Union Memorial Hospital.

I probed Mama about the circumstances of my birth constantly. As she had told me since my earliest memory, she labored hard and long before giving birth. “Did you get to know any of the other mothers?” I asked probingly.

Were there other baby girls born on April 9? Was she awake when they brought me to her the first time?

“You’re mine, alright,” she would say, setting her mouth in a line.

Mama, who had loved something called “dramatic recitation” when she was a schoolgirl, repeated the hard labor story so many times and with such dramatic flair that I believed when I was very young she meant I was born on the night of April . . . as if she had been in the throes of suffering every day and night until my stubborn appearance. 

Marshall grudgingly lent me his bike one afternoon. Racing along a dirt path near our houses, I barely avoided a large rock by suddenly screeching to a stop, slamming down on the hard crossbar.

Once home, I realized I was bleeding. Rushing to my mother, I told her about how I’d hurt myself riding a boy’s bike and pleaded to be taken to the hospital. Mom rose up from reading True Romance magazine. She took me to her bathroom, presenting me with large bandages. “But I need to go to the hospital!” I protested. 

“No, you don’t,” she replied. “You will be doing this every month from now on.”  Then she returned to True Romance. Only weeks later would I realize how short-changed her answer had left me. But that was in the ’60s, when many mothers felt the less adolescents knew about reproduction, the better.

Was I a hemophiliac like the doomed Romanovs?

On the next sleepover at Judy’s house, I confided my puzzling illness.

The lower part of me, I told Judy, was permanently damaged. Prone to sudden bleeding. After my bike injury, Mama had warned me to always carry bandages.

Judy said this didn’t sound right. She wanted to seek answers from her mother.

She returned with Helen, whose face softened as I told her about the incident that had triggered my condition.

Helen took my hand. “It’s not an injury,” she reassured me. “It’s very natural.” She suggested Judy and I get a snack.

A smiling Helen was waiting with intriguing boxes labelled “The Invisible Woman” and “The Invisible Man.”

She pulled the anatomically correct dolls from their boxes and quietly explained reproduction. We both felt the importance of the moment, and she met our few questions with simple, clear answers. Helen used words like menses and did not pander.

I adored her with my whole heart.

However, none of this was especially heartening. The one truth Mama had shared was that my predicament was recurring.

When I returned home from the sleepover, I tested my knowledge with my 15-year-old sister, Sharon, who was six years older. She snorted. “Why are they telling you about the facts of life?” she demanded. “You’re just a snotty-nosed kid.”

I rolled my eyes at her ignorant self, and ran outside in search of Marshall’s bike. But the evening star had popped out over Marshall’s house, so too late to ride to the creek. I turned back; the smell of chicken frying in hot Crisco wafted through the screen door as I plopped unhappily onto the back porch to think. 

The unsolved mystery of my birth family continued.

Inside, no question about it, Mama was already cooking dinner for me and my supposed siblings.