Things happen for a reason, Donna Anderson believes, but sometimes it takes a long while to understand that reason.
When she was 19 years old, Anderson and a girlfriend bought one-way tickets to Hawaii. They found an apartment and jobs and started a new life away from the cold winters of the upper midwest. Things seemed to be going well. They were invited to a party where Anderson met a Marine.
"How can you resist tall, dark and handsome?" she asks, looking back at her 19-year-old self. She describes herself as very naive for a 19-year-old. She never suspected her Marine was already engaged to a girl back home with a wedding scheduled. When she told him she was pregnant, he didn't want to have anything more to do with her.
By then the girlfriend she had arrived with had gone home to plan her own wedding and Anderson was alone without enough income to even keep her apartment. Luckily, her doctor helped her find a family that hired her as a nanny, but she still had a decision to make.
She had grown up without a father, due to her parents' divorce. Back then, divorce was rare, all of her friends had both parents and she didn't want her baby to grow up without a father. She decided to put the baby up for adoption.
When the baby was born, he was taken away immediately. She wasn't able to hold him, but she snuck out of her hospital room and found the nursery where she stood and gazed at him through the glass. A nurse felt sorry for her and wheeled him over next to the window and that was the only glimpse she had of her baby.
Anderson went home to South Dakota without her baby and didn't tell anyone what had happened. Her mother knew something was wrong when Anderson spent months inside, depressed and lonely. Eventually, at her mother's urging, she went out and found a new job and moved to Minneapolis.
Eventually, she married, but they never had children. It felt, she said, as if she was being punished for her mistake at 19.
Then in 2013, she got a phone call.
"At first I thought he was a timeshare salesman," she said, but he only had to ask her a couple of questions before she knew exactly who he was.
"It was the weirdest thing," she said. She told him, "I've been waiting for this call all my life."
It turned out that her son, Kent, had been raised in central Florida. The family who adopted him was actually a last-minute substitution. Another family had backed out. Years later, when he started his search, all he had were old hospital records with the patient's name -- her name -- cut out with a razor. He hired a private detective who was able to figure out the missing name from the tops of the letters that had been left behind.
They got to know each other slowly through email and pictures. Eventually, she flew to Florida to meet him in person. She met him and his parents that first trip. His adoptive mother threw herself into Anderson's arms, she remembers, and they became friends immediately.
There were many trips over the years. She met Kent's wife and his children. She introduced all of them to her husband and they visited Kent's home in North Carolina. She met them in South Dakota where she showed them her old stomping grounds.
She told him that when she was pregnant, she would bring the children she cared for down to the pool every afternoon and they would dance to her favorite songs. The next time she saw him, he had a playlist of all the music she had danced to when she was carrying him.
"He had a really good life," she said. "He went to college and then to graduate school. He had the chance to travel ... I couldn't have given him all that."
People comment on how much they look alike and mannerisms they share.
She told him what she knows about his biological father which isn't very much, but he's not interested in meeting him. Finding his biological mother filled the hole, he said, and she knew exactly what he meant. Finding him filled a hole in her as well.
They talked about health and Anderson told him she was overall pretty healthy, but she did have kidney disease. It was something she had been dealing with for a long time and it was progressing slowly.
A few years ago, she was told that it was time for dialysis, but she didn't want to be hooked up to a machine. The only alternative was a kidney transplant.
She told Kent about it during one of their phone calls and he immediately started asking questions. She immediately tried to discourage him -- she didn't want to take his kidney.
"I'm going to get tested," he said, "You can't tell me what I can or can't do. I'm an adult."
He was also a near-perfect match. After a lot of prayers, she finally accepted his kidney and the procedure went very well.
"It kicked in immediately," she said. She woke up from the surgery feeling better than she had felt for 30 years. Her son also recovered quickly.
"For all those years, I kept this big, deep, ugly secret. Even my mother didn't know for years. I just held it all in."
When her secret finally came out, she gained a son, three grandchildren and a whole new life through the kidney transplant.
Things, she said, happen for a reason.
General News on 08/21/2019