Photo: Jenny Thomas / YouTube, Pinterest (TLC network)
The search took 15 years
The 40-year-old Jenny Thomas was released as a baby for adoption. When she was 25, she started looking for her birth mother. After all, Jenny knew she lived in the same city as she did. But all in vain.
One day, Jenny read a report on "Long Lost Family, " a new American television reality show where family members are being tracked down. Jenny regained hope to meet her mother and applied to the show.
Adopted New York woman shocked to learn co-worker of two years is birth mother. https://t.co/A0YoKMPfIm pic.twitter.com/0koEvm9bSR
- Toronto Sun (@TheTorontoSun) March 3, 2016
In the program (aired on March 13 this year on TLC ), Jenny recounted her story of how she learned at age four that she was adoped before the presenter gave her a photograph of her birth mother. When Jenny glanced over, she was shocked: "Oh my God - I know her!" Jenny knew the woman in the photo: Nita Valdez.
Without knowing that it is her mother, she worked side by side with her at the Rochester Hospital for two years. The mother did not know that she worked there with her daughter about ten years ago.
Jenny worked there part-time as a technical nurse, her mother as a patient transporter. In everyday life it said: Jenny has accepted the patients, who picked up her mother and gave her. So they had more to do with each other, conducted small talk, got along very well. "We had the same humor, " Jenny recalls.
"So many times have I walked around, looked people in the face and asked myself: Could this be my mother and now I find out that it was actually one of those people ...", Jenny said, bursting into tears. "Not in a million years, I could have dreamed that my mother was only an arm's length away from me."
Mother Nita became pregnant at the age of 17. She had a relationship with a minister who did not want to accept a child from an illegitimate love affair, so she released Jenny for adoption. Not a nice memory. So it happened that Nita pulled back after the meeting with her daughter in the show more and more. "That's okay, " says Jenny. "I just wanted to look her in the eye, see where I'm from, " says Jenny. "I am so thankful for the opportunity to have met her, to have certainty."
Jenny's adoptive parents are "absolutely phenomenal, " Jenny enthuses. "I would not be where I am now in life if I had not had it."
And then the next good news: Jenny learns from her mother that she has a brother - whom Nita also gave up for adoption. He is one year younger than Jenny. Jenny wants to meet him next ...
(WW7)
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