Camille McIntyre will celebrate Christmas with two people she just met - her "expected any second" daughter and her mother.
Betsy Tatsuno, Sun Valley, Idaho, gave McIntyre up for adoption at birth 22 years ago in California. Three weeks ago, the mother's three-year search ended when the two talked on the phone, then visited with each other."I always wondered about my mother and wanted to find her," McIntyre said. "But I was hesitant. I figured she gave me up for adoption and maybe she didn't want to see me. I've heard of people who met their mothers and it was all very cold and unhappy."
While McIntyre was wondering whether she should search, Tatsuno was working with a woman in California who has a network that tries to reunite mothers and the children they have given up.
"I wanted to wait until she was 18," Tatsuno said. "It had to be her choice whether she wanted to know me. I didn't want to try to replace her adoptive father - he has always been her father. (Her adoptive mother died when she was 9.) Her stepmother's terrific and I can't take that away."
The "terrifying" phone call she made, with her voice cracking and her heart pounding, was no less shocking for McIntyre.
"I lost it; I was in shock. Somehow, it never occurred to me that she was looking for me. I didn't know how to feel," the Salt Lake woman said.
Any doubts the women had about each other were erased as they sat with their blond heads together, looking into each other's green eyes. "We are a mirror image," McIntyre said.
Her father and stepmother were more cautious, she said. "There's no way after 22 years I'd stop loving the parents who raised me and turn to my real mother."
McIntyre feels like she has found the pieces to a puzzle. She knows that her birth father died in 1974. She has a stepbrother who is 9. She finally has answers to medical questions, like why one of her three sons has asthma.
They contacted the press, McIntyre said, because adopted children and the parents who gave them up need to know there are inexpensive ways to try to find each other. In Utah, there's an adoption registry. If both sign up, there's a "hit" and they are put in contact with each other.
Tatsuno found three sources of assistance: Adoption Reality in California, Foundex in Nevada and the Salvation Army. Other agencies, she said, also help children and parents reunite.
"My Christmas came early," McIntyre said. "What a present."