A mother has gone viral on social media this week after finally reuniting with the child that she put up for adoption 45 years ago.
According to a recent report by NBC News, Brenda Van Sickle was just 15 years old when she got pregnant, and 16 years old when she delivered a baby boy in Fort Worth, Texas, way back in 1975.
Per NBC, Brenda was unable to care for her newborn baby at the time, being too young to support a child properly. So she put the child up for adoption soon after giving birth.
The lives of the young mother and her son diverged. Brenda got married, became part of the TV news business, and currently works in the public information office of the Arlington Police Department.
But she never forgot about the little boy she had to give up and was determined to find and reconnect with him again.
Recently, this single father adopted five children at once so they could stay together:Per NBC, a few months ago everything changed for Brenda when she received a phone call from a man called Wes Fenner, who hailed from New Orleans in Louisiana.
Brenda agreed to meet Wes at a hotel in Terrell. When she did so, Wes revealed that he was her biological son and that he'd been looking for her for over a decade, finally finding her thanks to DNA testing and the help of an adoption search "angel."
The emotional reunion led to mother and son hugging for a full 20 minutes.
Commenting on the experience of giving up her child in an interview with NBC, Brenda stated:
"I did see him for about 15 minutes before the nurse took him away. It was very hard. If I could have taken care of him, I would have. But it just wasn't right to do that to him. It was all I could do to sign those papers and walk out the door and leave him."
She added:
"You know you wonder about nature versus nurture. We send each other song lyrics back and forth and he listens to the same music I do. We like the same movies. We have the same snarky sense of humor. I'm going: 'Yeah, this is my kid.'
"I'm looking forward to the next stage. Meeting him wasn't the end of the journey. It's an ongoing journey."
Meanwhile, Wes himself stated:
"It was an awkward first conversation. She was not expecting a phone call at work saying: 'Hi, did you put a child up for adoption in 1975?' That was an odd phone call."
He added:
"I’m not a huge crier. But it was definitely one of those moments. It was kind of like looking at myself, a slightly older version of myself, in the mirror."
According to NBC, more than 100,000 children are adopted every year in the United States.
