Vendor Spotlight: Mary Ann F.

‘It was like a miracle’: How Mary Ann Fuller reconnected with her children after 40 years

BY JUSTIN WAGNER

When Mary Ann Fuller met her son James earlier this year, she wept.

It had been the first time in more than 40 years.

“When I seen him — ‘oh my God,’” Mary Ann said. “I ran to him, crippled or not crippled, and he caught me. When he put his hands on me, I told him, ‘you don’t let me fall,’ and then he called me ‘mama.’ Nothing else mattered. I said, ‘what did you say?’”

Mary Ann looked up and saw her son’s eyes. Half her life had passed since she had last seen his eyes, or felt his hands.

“He said, ‘I said mama.’ And when I looked up in his eyes, he was crying. He said, ‘I’m not gonna let you fall.’”

They cried together.

Mary Ann had two children, James and Barbara, several decades ago. The woman that raised Mary Ann adopted the two away from her without her consent. She remembers the last moment she saw them, while locked into an argument with their new legal guardian, vividly.

“My son was coming down the steps, and he could hear that me and his mama were having words,” Mary Ann recalled. ”And she says, ‘You get yourself back up the stairs.’ I had a chance to go upstairs and talk to my son … I didn’t want to go to jail. All I wanted to do was talk to my children.”

“He was only 13 years old. My daughter was two years younger. He turned around … he could see the tears in my eyes. And that’s the last time that I got to talk to him or see him.”

As time passed, Mary Ann lost contact with them. For years, she was a stranger to them both. While she always desired to find them again, it was a matter she kept private, fearing that having lost them for so many years would be looked down upon.

“I had to hide this inside of me for so many years,” she said. “It wasn’t because I wanted to lie, I didn’t want to be judged by anybody.”

It was at the behest of Donna Matthews, a friend of Mary Ann’s, that she took an Ancestry DNA test to find any living relatives and connect with them. At that time, Matthews was not even aware that Mary Ann had any children.

“In my heart of hearts — I’ve known Mary for a couple of years now — in my heart of hearts, I just, you know, if something happened to Mary, I just wanted to know if she had any relatives out there,” Matthews said. “I would hate to think that someone would pass away and you wouldn't be able to let someone know.”

Matthews said Mary Ann was hesitant, even after the process began, but eventually relented, allowing Matthews to handle the minutiae and receive the results — which revealed she had a son.

“When we got the results back, I was just freaking blown away.”

Matthews’ surprise was twofold. She was about to see a family reconverge, of course; but this was the second time she saw it in the span of a few weeks.

“The irony of this whole story is, I'm adopted. And when I was in the Navy, I gave my daughter up for adoption. She and I just reconnected after 44 years on July the 11th,” Matthews said. “Two weeks later, I get the results of Mary’s DNA test.”

She took the results to Mary Ann, first asking if she had any children.

After a long, reticent breath, the reply came: “Yeah, I do.”

“She didn't want anything to do with it, took me two and a half hours to convince her to at least let him reach out to her,” Matthews recalled. “The next day she was sitting in our living room on Zoom, on my computer, talking to her son face to face. After that she, him, and his sister Barbara did a conference call on my phone for three and a half hours.”

Mary Ann remembered the initial calls with tearful fondness.

“It was like a miracle come true after so many years,” she said.

They caught up as the hours passed, making up as best they could for decades of lost time. Mary Ann told her children that all she wanted now was to see and hold them again.

Two days later, Mary Ann got a call from Matthews. Though James now lived in Florida, he was vacationing in Georgia at the time — the two discussed options, and agreed to meet halfway.

“Donna called me up and she said, ‘Mary, I need you to be up and dressed by 9:30.’ I said, ‘where are we goin’?’ She said, ‘We’re gonna go see your son.’”

So they reunited, and have continued to talk to each other daily since. They share their day to day on frequent calls, celebrating the small things they can now share. For Mary Ann, these little talks are a decades long burden finally lifted. She hopes to continue them for, “as long as God gives [her] the breath.”

She hopes to rekindle the same sort of connection with her daughter as soon as they are able to meet. In the meantime, she felt it important she share her story with whoever would hear it. The fear that once prevented her from even breaching this subject burned away, she said.

Joy took its place.

“I just want people to know how I feel, because there’s somebody out there that may be going through the same thing I’m going through,” she said. “I’m happy now … if people want to judge me, judge me, but nothing else matters to me now. The only thing that matters to me now is my kids.”