When you’re as young as 18 years old, you can’t possibly be sure about what you want to study at a university or what job you want to do in the future, let alone starting a family.
Teens and young adults sometimes do face unintended- and often unwanted- pregnancies. This brings them to the position of choosing what they want to do going forward.
Are they ready to birth the baby and parent it? Or, would adoption be a better route to explore?
In some cases giving the baby up for adoption feels like the best option both for the baby and for the parents.
One of those cases was an 18-year-old couple who had a baby 76 years ago, and after considering their options carefully, they decided to give their daughter, Harriet, up.
Three years later, another baby girl was born. Linda grew up in her birth parents’ home, never finding out that she had a long-lost sister.
Harriet Carter and Linda Hoffman grew up in different states, one lives in Lakewood, Colorado, and the other one in California.
Since their parents passed away decades ago, they never got the chance to find out the big secret.
All that until they both signed up for ancestry.com. They were both curious to know if they had relatives around the world, so they took the DNA test- and the results shocked them.
“I had a message from Harriet saying, ‘I think we might be related,'” Hoffman told Denver 7. “We were 100% match, but our parents never told a soul ever.”
The two women, after finding out they were sisters, started chatting on the phone every day.
Unfortunately, the pandemic didn’t let them meet in person all this time, but just before Christmas, they decided it was time to arrange the flight.
Hoffman prepared a special room just for Carter, and she even decorated it with cute Christmas stuff. On a Tuesday in December, Carter’s flight arrived in Lakewood, where her younger sister was waiting for her.
When the two met, they immediately recognized each other, and they hugged tight.
“I can’t quit staring at you,” Hoffman admitted.
Their excitement was such that they didn’t waste time- they sat down right there, at the arrivals hall, and started looking at old family photos that Hoffman had brought with her.
Hoffman told her long-lost sister: “This picture is sad because you’re not in it.”
“To see all these pictures of the love and the bonding and the closeness… now that I get older, it’s especially relevant,” Carter added.
The two women then went to Hoffman’s house where they spent some quality time together.
The newly-found sisters are not focusing on all the years they missed without knowing each other, but on the time they have left together.
“I think we found each other when we were supposed to,” Hoffman said.
Be sure to watch the heartwarming video below to see the sisters meet for the first time!
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