Therefore, I was a big surprise.

She hadn’t told my dad that she was unable to bear children -- it seems she was unable to bear telling the man who would make such a wonderful daddy that he wouldn’t have the chance to be a daddy with her -- thus he was overjoyed that he was going to be a father, but I was not nearly the miracle to him that I was to my mother.

I turned out to be the only miracle. Though my parents tried their hardest to give me a little brother or sister to torture and tease, I remain their only child. In a suburban world of 2-point-3 kids per household, I was the only one of my circle of friends who didn’t have a sibling to bitch about, a fact that has turned out to be very indicative of my personality.

For a few weeks every summer and some Christmases, I had 5 cousins to pick on me, torment me and make my life a living hell when my parents and I would fly out to San Francisco from our self-imposed exile in Tulsa, Oklahoma to visit with the Family. I will never forget the thrill of a good game of “Midnight Noogie Hide-n-Seek” with my cousins Ted and Stevey and their friend Stan. Of course, I can also never forget the mind-numbing fear of facing my dad after one of the many times the three of us went Too Far ... the time I crashed Gramma’s yellow Pinto into Mrs. Diamond’s Cougar across the cul-de-sac while playing “Space Alien Testing Used Flying Saucer” with Ted comes to mind.

Unfortunately those weeks went by so quickly and all too soon we were on an airplane headed back to our lonely exile.

As we’ve gotten older, my cousins and I have grown apart considerably. Ted and Stevey don’t really like each other anymore and aren’t very nice people to boot; Saya became a sort of shooting star and hasn’t really been able to be around for years; Kierin, Saya’s brother, was never fond of me and that hasn’t changed any; and Trent, the youngest of us all, has always been in a strange world none of us dare enter, mostly in his head. Until I was 13 and my dad sold the pool table in the basement, I had a pool-hustling brother named Sam who taught me all he knew. (Of course he wasn’t the best shooter there ever was; I could usually beat him 2 out of 3.) My mistake with Sam was letting it slip to my mom that I often played pool with my invisible pool-hustling brother Sam. It wasn’t long after that Dad sold the pool table to his best friend and I was escorted to the nearest psychologist for my first psychiatric evaluation.

Though I never saw my pool-hustling brother Sam ever again, I had learned something very important. Invisible siblings disappear.

Meanwhile, all my sibling-rich friends were still bitching about little NeeNee (“Cause she can’t say Nancy, she’s such a little spoiled brat”) or Mark the older Abuse-Is-Love jock brother. I never told them they were lucky sons-of-bitches and they should be grateful for the company, but I thought it ... many times.

Eventually I figured out that in some matters, blood is basically irrelevant. I was closer to some of my friends than they were to their brothers or sisters ... evidently, sharing DNA does not guarantee a best friend for life. This was a very significant step for me, which made it easier for me to forgive my parents for stopping at 1. Y’see, up to this point, I hadn’t known about my mom’s cancer. She finally told my dad of her alleged infertility when I was a baby, but she didn’t tell me and he never told me. I had just assumed that I popped out and after they saw me, they made an oath: “Never again.”

By sophomore year in college, I’d cast nearly 10 friends in the various family roles I craved. I had older brothers who would tickle me while I was trying to drink milk and embarrass me in front of cute guys; I had three sisters who independently wavered between sweet and shrew; and I finally found the passive younger brother to my bossy older sister. Come senior year, I even gained a daughter, a freshman named Carol who for some inexplicable reason admired me and evoked my Nurturer.

Of all those friends and “family”, only one shared my only child status. Her name was Heather, she was just like me ... only opposite. We were the most volatile of best friends.

Sophomore year, Heather and her amazing charisma intervened in my social life, stealing from me the possibility of dating the smartest guy I ever met. Had she not befriended his roommate and convinced him, then Todd of my unstable disposition, I would have attended last year’s 5th reunion on the arms of the oft-quoted “Genius Physicist” ... who would also have been known as my husband.

Then, a week later, the mosquitoes invaded our college suite on a night when Heather and I happened to be alone in the same room at the same time. It was War: Human versus Insect, and there was no room for Human versus other Human. She grabbed the broom and I wielded my faithful Zippo and in a matter of hours, we had rid the suite of every last mosquito in Western Illinois. The next morning, we breakfasted together as usual. Besides being the only “Onlies” in our circle, Heather and I also shared our status as children of ovarian cancer. Her mother’s cancer appeared when Heather was 5, but after my mom finally told me the whole deal (about the cancer, infertility and my “miraculous” birth); Heather was the perfect one to talk to. She and her mom had discussed it during “The Talk” when she was 10 so she was able to answer a lot of my questions and understand how strange it is to think that your own mother could have died (which, in my case, also meant that I would never have been born.) To me, it’s been kind of spooky, the similarities between me and Heather: parallel histories, crossed paths, same general background and upbringing. Knowing her once made me believe in reincarnation with a purpose and not knowing her now hasn’t really changed that.

So now I’m an adult surrounded by friends and acquaintances who tell wistful stories of an older sister or twin brother who always has a shoulder or ear to offer, a small loan or simply a funny memory about Uncle Frank and that Christmas when he got Dad so drunk they pissed in Gramma’s fern and she sent them home without Christmas Dinner.

These relationships, I’m realizing now, are much more complex than I ever would have guessed. The very same person who once held your head under a faucet running cold and wouldn’t let you breathe until you declared him King of the Fort forwards and backwards is now offering to loan you $1,000 so that you can move to a nicer area of town and not have to take so many buses to see the baseball games. And it’s right around now, when you call your parents to tell them how well they raised their oldest son and what a gentleman he is, that you find out that if it hadn’t been for him, you would have been banned from the Branch Bunch and ordered to vacate the Fort the day you stole Timmy’s girlfriend in 5th grade.

It appears to me that there is a correlation between love and hate wherever siblings are concerned. In some cases, as siblings age, they grow closer and bad, scary memories are amusing anecdotes during visits home; in other cases, they apparently forget about each other and become pseudo “Onlies”.

I know these 3 guys. One is the oldest of 3 boys and is the single, most controlling bastard I know. Another, the one I love, is the Middle Child of 3 boys and he likes to get my attention when he thinks I’m forgetting about him. The last is my “younger brother” I spoke of earlier ... whiny, inattentive, sometimes a tag-along Pest. He’s the youngest of 3 boys.

The first guy still talks to his brothers and claims to love them and be on the lookout for them, but whenever I see him with either brother (I’ve never actually seen the 3 of them together ... hmm), I feel their inferiority complexes in his shadow. He keeps them around in fear of his wrath.

The third friend, the Baby, exhibits apathy and doesn’t really follow his brothers or their lives. He knows that the oldest is married and a father and the second oldest is working in the independent movie business, but he can’t even remember their birthdays. His mom calls every August 5th and November 11th to remind him that a birthday is a week away; “It would be nice for you to send him a little something.”

Finally, the one I love, the Middle Child, bears resentment against his brothers for their positions in the order of emergence. It appears, Mom and Dad had a tendency to side with the Oldest or the Baby, leaving the one I love feeling less loved by his own parents. I wasn’t there, I’ve only heard, but I respect his family less for making him feel this. Of course, I’m biased.

All of this leads me right back to where I began. I am still an Only and I am still in search of siblings. For better or worse ... it can’t be worse than being alone.