Mom reunites with Daughter 17 years after putting her up for adoption

““When I looked into her eyes, I saw my eyes. Watching her smile and laugh felt nothing less than surreal. She was home.”

In the midst of the backstage madness, 13-year-old Evie turned to her mum Gina and remarked that the girl sitting in the front row of the dress rehearsal looked a lot like her biological sister.

The US mum hardly looked up – she was crazy busy and it wasn’t the first time one of her kids thought they spotted the daughter she had given up for adoption 17 years earlier.

“But I thought to myself could it be her, after all of this time?” she wrote on Love What Matters.

Then she recognised her daughter’s adoptive father.

Gina’s stomach dropped as he signalled she should come over to meet her daughter.

“I reached out and grabbed her without hesitation and pulled her into my chest,” Gina recalled.

“Every pore in my body combined with hers, at that moment we were as one.”

Somehow in that split second, Gina felt the unfathomable weight she had been carrying for the past 17 years disappear.

She thought she would carry the grief of putting her little girl up for adoption for the rest of her life but suddenly it was gone.

“For the first time I realised what a wonderful decision I had made,” she said.

“She was alive, she was happy, she was sitting here with me now, and all I could think about was how I created her.

“Had I never found the courage to go through with the pregnancy, had I chosen to get an abortion and let her and all of it disappear as if nothing happened, she wouldn’t be sitting here next to me.”

Gina was 19, single and living away from home when she discovered she was pregnant.

She remembers lying in the bath trying to quell the rolling waves of panic washing over her body.

“The double red lines on my pregnancy test kept presenting itself, in my mind, like flashing neon lights,” she said.

“That $6.99 plastic stick read everything about me, my past, my future, and who I would be labelled as for the rest of my life.

“I didn’t need a mirror to look into, that stick showed my reflection perfectly, a teenage pregnancy, a statistic.”

She felt the only option was to give the baby up for adoption.

In 1999, she looked through stacks of double-sided pages from adoption agencies, desperately searching for the perfect parents for her unborn girl.

Finally, she found them and was shocked to find out the couple were expecting a baby boy just six weeks after her own due date.

“They would be raising twins!” she thought.

Nine months later, her perfect daughter arrived with Gina spending “four priceless days” with her before the adoptive parents arrived.

“’Be a good girl. Remember how much I love you. Remember my voice. Be a good girl’ I whispered, into the tiniest ear that I had ever seen,” Gina said.

“After I placed her in the arms of her adoptive father, I got into my parents’ car and sat next to her empty car seat; its hollowness confirmed the emptiness I felt inside.

“That first night without her was unbearable.”

The grief never completely went away – even after Gina gave birth to three other children with her husband who she met after the adoption took place.

She waited anxiously for the letters and pictures that arrived each year on her daughter’s birthday.

And even started a charity to help other birth mums cope with the pain of losing their child.

Gina loved her three other kids to the moon and back – and made sure they knew they had another sister somewhere in the world.

“Learning to live without my little butterfly has not been easy; and yet this is the only life I know,” she said.

“I started to find more peace in my life once I accepted the hole in my heart, where my little butterfly belongs, and stopped trying to fill it with something or someone else.”

After that magical moment of meeting her eldest child 17 years after handing her over as a tiny newborn, Gina spent the next year getting to know her girl via text – being careful to respect the teen’s boundaries.

Then the girl messaged to ask if she could meet her biological siblings.

“The excitement and anticipation from my family, waiting behind me, could not be more fitting of my entire adoption journey,” Gina said.

“I wrapped my arms around her familiar body, as I had done once before, and pulled her into me and allowed the light to flow between us.

“When I looked into her eyes, I saw my eyes.

“When I heard her laugh, I heard an echo. Watching her smile and laugh in the space that I call home felt nothing less than surreal.

“She was home.””

Mum reunites with daughter 17 years after putting her up for adoption
[Kidspot 1/4/19 by Madeline Cox]

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