She told me she had been adopted as a newborn in 1948, and had spent her whole life searching for the teenage girl who gave her up. That girl was my mother.
My mother, at seventeen, unmarried in a small town in a hard year, had had a baby and been made to give her away. She never told a soul. Not her husband, not me, not anyone, for the rest of her long life.
I sat down on my kitchen floor and cried — not out of anger, but grief for the girl my mother had been, carrying that alone for sixty years while she raised me.
My sister and I met three weeks later at a little diner halfway between us. We are the same height. We laugh the same way. We both hate cilantro.
We are seventy-four and seventy-six now, and we have lost so much time. But we have breakfast together every single Sunday, and I have stopped being an only child. My mother kept one secret her whole life, and in the end, it gave me a sister.
Get Heartwarming Stories in Your Inbox
Join thousands of readers getting uplifting stories every week.