Source: WKBN
I have no idea what it’s like to be adopted, but I always imagined that adopted children and even some adults spend quite a bit of time looking into the faces of complete strangers, wondering if they’re their long lost parents. Your father could be someone you pass on the street everyday. Your mother could be the woman who works in your building.
Though the notion of such a thing seems highly unlikely, that’s exactly what happened to La-Sonya Mitchell-Clark, 38, of Youngstown, Ohio.
Mitchell-Clark told WKBN, an Ohio CBS affiliate, from the day she learned she was adopted, she wanted to find her biological mother.
That dream became a reality last month when the Ohio Department of Health released birth records for people born between January 1964 and September 1996. Mitchell-Clark’s record included the name of her birth mother, Francine Simmons.
Mitchell-Clark looked the woman up on Facebook and discovered that she worked at Infocision in Boardman, Ohio, the same company and inside the same building where Mitchell-Clark is currently employed.
That’s when Mitchell-Clark realized that she knew of a Francine at her job. The woman worked in another department, at the front desk.
Mitchell-Clark reached out to a few of her other friends on social media for help. Then the next day, she got a phone call from her birth mother.
“She called me and I said, ‘Is this Ms. Francine? She said yes. I said, ‘I think I’m your daughter.'”
The two women burst into tears.
Francine Simmons said that she’s still in shock. Like Mitchell-Clark, she too has wanted to reconnect but didn’t know how to go about it.
She explained, “I got pregnant when I was 14. I had her when I was 15. I was put in a home, a girl’s home. Had her. Got to hold her. Didn’t get to name her, but I named her myself in my heart all these years.”
When she found her mother, Mitchell-Clark also found three other sisters, one who works at Infocision with her mother and newfound sister.
Kamala Cummings, the sister, said through tears, “I feel a sense of relief for my mother.”
Her other sister, Maisaha Cummings said, “It’s just amazing that all this time we’re thinking about her and trying to find her and she was trying to find us too.”
Not only do the mother and daughter pair work in the same office, they live six minutes away from one another.
Mitchell-Clark says her adoptive parents have always been supportive of her searching for her birth mother. She said that they’re going to be a part of the new relationship with Simmons.
Simmons agrees, “Now, we’ve got a bigger extended family where we can just be together.”
You can watch the two women discuss their reunion in the video below.
