Image by Alice Woodrome

I met Louise Rosefield on my seventeenth birthday, and in a way, I guess it was like being born all over again. Of course, it was her birthday, too, which is the central fact in both of our lives. Things like this are not supposed to happen in real life - and they still don't know how such a colossal mistake could have been made, but it changed the destiny of two families forever. Louise and I were born during the same hour at University Hospital in Chicago Illinois. Somehow we were switched at birth. No one suspected a thing until last year when Louise needed a kidney transplant. The whole family was tested to see if any of them would be a good match. Everyone was in shock when it was determined that, not only was there not a match, Louise was not even a part the Rosefield family. Of course, there were DNA tests done immediately. They proved that she was not related genetically to either her mother or her father. After months of investigation, it was found that she had been switched with another baby at birth. I was that baby.

Of course, the news came as a shock to our whole family, as well. My mother couldn't keep from crying. My father reacted with anger - thinking that the Rosefields, who could buy and sell the Sears Tower, were trying to take away his healthy daughter. Didn't matter that I was, in reality, their flesh and blood and not his - he was determined to bar every attempt to even discuss a face to face meeting for fear they would spirit me away. He didn't even seem to be interesting in meeting, Louise, his real daughter. I imagined at the time that he was afraid that they intended to make him legally responsible for her medical bills. It was untrue, of course, but my father was always on the edge of bankruptcy, and I just knew it was about money.

I was prepared to hate Louise Rosefield. She was living the life of privilege I should have been living - vacations in the south of France, all the clothes her heart desired. She and her brother rubbed shoulders with celebrities and held parties on their yacht on Lake Michigan. The fact that Louise had nearly died and was on dialysis three times a week didn't lesson my sense of being cheated out of my birthright.

My family had tried to raise me right, but we were poor and I resented it as only a teenager can. All of the love in the world could not make up for not having the money to dress the way the other kids in school did. Time spent doing things with my family did not compensate for the embarrassment I felt about the shack we lived in. When the other kids were getting cars for their sixteen birthdays, I got a Timex watch. I was mad before I even heard of Louise Rosefield.

And then Louise and I met. My immediate reaction at the sight of the pale girl was pity, then curiosity and finally affection as I realized that she had been cheated too, not only of health, but also of much more. I'm sure her parents loved her, but her father was always away on business and even her mother, who did volunteer work for the Chicago Arts Council, was rarely at home. Louise felt closer, she told me, to her governess than she did her parents. We talked for two hours as if we were sisters.

In the days that followed, we spent time with each other's families. My mother offered immediately to donate a kidney if she was a good match. And I was invited to dinner with the Rosefields at the yacht club. It was decided by the families that Louise and I would simply have two sets of parents. Louise told me two years later that she thought it was fate, and that she was glad we had been switched at birth. "I never would have met my best friend," she said "how else would we ever get together?" I felt the same way.

Louise was the maid of honor at my wedding and she and her husband are Godparents to our little girl, who has six pair of grandparents. The way I look at it is this: a child can't have too many people who love her, and it doesn't hurt to have at least one set of parents who can afford a honeymoon in the South of France.

The End