"Hola, mamá.”
This may seem like an unremarkable greeting between mother and son, but not in this case.
Forty-two years ago, María Angélica González gave birth to a boy who was taken from her arms right after birth. The hospital workers later told her he had died. Now, she finally gets to meet him face-to-face at her home in Valdivia, ChileAza
“I love you very much,” Jimmy Lippert Thyden told his mother in Spanish as they embraced amid tears.
“It knocked the wind out of me. ... I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment,” Thyden told The Associated Press in a video call after the reunion. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?”
Thyden's journey to find the birth family he never knew started in April after he read stories on the news about Chilean-born adoptees who had been reunited with their birth relatives with the help of a Chilean nonprofit Nos Buscamos.
The organization learned that Thyden had been born prematurely at a hospital in Santiago, Chile's capital, and placed in an incubator. What happened next was not what a new mother should ever need to hear.
González was told to leave the hospital, but when she returned to get her baby, she was told he had died and his body had been disposed of, according to the case file, which Thyden summarized to the AP.
“The paperwork I have for my adoption tells me I have no living relatives. And I learned in the last few months that I have a mama and I have four brothers and a sister,” Thyden said in the interview from Ashburn, Virginia, where he works as a criminal defense attorney representing “people who look like me” who cannot afford a lawyer.
He said his was a case of “counterfeit adoption.”
Nos Buscamos estimates tens of thousands of babies were taken from Chilean families in the 1970s and 1980s, based on a report from the Investigations Police of Chile which reviewed the paper passports of Chilean children who left the country and never came back.
“The real story was these kids were stolen from poor families, poor women that didn’t know. They didn’t know how to defend themselves,” said Constanza del Río, founder and director and Nos Buscamos.
Over the past nine years, Nos Buscamos has helped more than 450 reunions between adoptees and their birth families, del Río said.
Other nonprofit organizations are helping and operating in a similar fashion, including Hijos y Madres del Silencio in Chile and Connecting Roots in the United States.
Thyden took a DNA test that confirmed that he was 100% Chilean which matched him to a first cousin who also uses the MyHeritage platform.
Thyden sent the cousin his adoption papers with photos, which included an address for his birth mother and a very common name in Chile: María Angélica González.
“Then just the dam broke,” said Thyden, who sent more photos of the American family who adopted him, his time in the U.S. Marines, his wedding, and many other memorable life moments.
“I was trying to bookend 42 years of a life taken from her. Taken from us both,” he said.
Thyden traveled to Chile with his wife, Johannah, and their two daughters, Ebba Joy, 8, and Betty Grace, 5, to meet his newly discovered family where he was greeted with 42 balloons.
“There is an empowerment in popping those balloons, empowerment in being there with your family to take inventory of all that was lost,” he said.
Thyden recalls his birth mother’s response to hearing from him: “Mijo (son) you have no idea the oceans I’ve cried for you. How many nights I’ve laid awake praying that God let me live long enough to learn what happened to you.”
González declined to be interviewed for this story, but it was a heartfelt reunion.
To learn more about Thyden's story, please view the video and/or click on the link below.
Source: NBC DFW