We’ve often wondered if the bond between mothers and their children is all nurture, or nature. Clearly, time spent together will naturally go a long way towards forming a tight bond.
But if you’d never your mum, would there be some sort of bond between you anyway? An instinctive thing that tells you ‘yep, you’re cut from the same cloth’?
We’d like to have thought so – but this woman has dashed our hopes.
Jenny Thomas was stunned when she found out that her birth mum was a colleague – who she’d worked with for two years!
The New Yorker had known she was adopted since the age of four. With little information known about her birth mother, she would find herself peering into women’s faces, wondering if any could be her mum.
After spending over 15 years intermittently trying to find her mum online, it wasn’t until Jenny signed up for the new TLC reality show Long Lost Family that she learned the incredible truth.
“I was just shocked,” she told The Post, talking about the moment she saw the photo of her real mum. “I had looked in so many faces for years, thinking ‘Could that be her? Is she looking at me because she knows me?’"
"All the while I had looked at the woman who once knew me as her daughter. I didn’t expect that. Not in a million years.”
The two women met 10 years ago, when Jenny was a part-time patient care technician at a New York hospital, and her mother Nita Valdez was a patient transporter.
They regularly interacted with each other as they moved patients from their rooms to rehab therapy.
And somewhat sadly, Jenny admits that there was never any real emotional connection at all…though they did share a sense of humour, at least.
“She’s very quiet, funny. I’m comical, so she would always laugh at my jokes, so that was a plus,” said Jenny. “But we never went past a working-professional relationship at all.”
Aww. Looks like nurture is what counts most!
