When San Harrison’s daughter, Lex Thompson, called one December morning to say she was sending an email, Harrison thought nothing of it.
Harrison, who’s lived in Tucson more than 20 years, and Thompson, who lives in Marietta, Georgia, regularly have coffee together over the phone on Sunday mornings.
But this time Thompson wanted to make sure Harrison had her laptop handy for their chat, under the guise of showing her mother photos of the work she did on her house.
However, the remodel wasn’t nearly as shocking as the photo Thompson would show her next.
“I said ‘Mom, I have some great news. Your girls are looking for you,’” Thompson said. “All I heard on the other end of the line was this massive gasp.”
The photo Thompson actually wanted her mother to see was of the twin daughters she had painfully placed for adoption 50 years ago.
“I said ‘I gotta take a minute because I knew I was gonna fall apart at the seams,’” Harrison recalled, her voice breaking. “So, it took me a while to open it … she just let me talk for a little bit.
“When I finally opened it up and saw them I fell apart because I knew it was them ... and I knew God had answered my prayers. When God does stuff like that, he doesn’t do a crap job. When he does stuff like that he does it good.”
‘Help us find our birth parents’
Twin sisters Lisa Hoepner and Tina Salava were celebrating their 50th birthday on Dec. 24 by hanging out with family and friends at Salava’s Wisconsin home. The group was drinking wine and chatting, when one friend asked if the women had thought of looking for their birth parents, since their adoptive parents were deceased.
They had, of course, but didn’t have a plan.
“I was like ‘I guess, but what are we gonna do, put it on Facebook?’ and they were like ‘Yeah let’s do it right now,’” Hoepner recalled.
Hoepner’s niece got to work on signs for the women to hold. They read: “Help us find our birth parents. Born in Green Bay, WI on Dec. 24, 1965 (St. Vincent Hospital). Please share!”
The twins each held up one part of the sign. Someone snapped a picture and put it on Facebook.
“It wasn’t planned or prepared at all,” Hoepner said. “We took the picture and I kinda forgot about it. I went away for the holiday.”
In a matter of five days, the photo was shared more than 30,000 times on Facebook and had landed in Thompson’s news feed.
Tuesday following their birthday, Hoepner got an interesting phone call while she was at work.
“My husband called and said ‘I got the strangest email,’ ” Hoepener said. “ ‘This lady said she might be your half sister.’ ”
Painful Decision
When San Harrison found herself single and pregnant at the age of 19, she was fully prepared to keep her baby and raise her.
She had a good job as a data entry clerk and thought she could take care of one baby.
However, two days before she gave birth, she was told she was having twins.
“I knew there was no way I could spread myself thin enough,” she recalled. “I didn’t have a good support system. I had good parents, but their hands were full with seven kids. I knew I couldn’t rely on other people to take care of me ... I didn’t know if I was gonna be single for a long time. I had a decent job and all, but a babysitter for two kids all day long? What kind of life would I give them? I knew in my heart that I had to let them go.”
Harrison decided to place the twins for adoption when they were born.
The experience was so painful and traumatic for Harrison she decided she had to release them fully, meaning she would not try to contact them later in life.
She made that decision early on as a way to cope and because she didn’t want to interfere with their lives.
“I determined at that time it was the only way I could handle it,” Harrison recalled. “Even in the judge’s chamber, I would break down and cry. It was a traumatic experience for me, but I did what I felt I had to to give them a life. I released them so they could have a good life.”
It took a few years to recover from that grief.
“They were born on Christmas Eve,” Harrison said. “It was really hard for me. I just prayed and one day it just lifted. I knew that they were OK ... and although I would think about them off and on, the pain wasn’t there anymore.”
Wonderful lives
Hoepner and Salava said they led full, wonderful lives with their adoptive parents in Wisconsin and that their adoption was never a secret.
“I don’t remember not knowing,” Hoepner said. “I remember Mom and Dad telling us we were special because we were chosen. They got to pick us. We thought that was a great thing because we got to be adopted.”
Their parents also adopted a son and eventually had a biological child of their own.
“We lived a full life with an incredible family,” Salava said.
The twins’ adoptive father died in 2001, their mother in 2014.
Shocking news
Harrison eventually married and had three more children. Only one of them — Thompson — knew anything about the twins.
Thompson found out in 2004 on a trip to Wisconsin when her grandmother died. Her parents had divorced, so she went to see her dad. He spilled the beans.
“The previous December, Josh (her brother) had twins and my dad and I were talking about twins,” Thompson said. “My dad said, ‘It must have been really really hard for your mom to give up the twins.’ And I was like ‘What!?’ His face got ashen and he said ‘Please don’t tell your mom. It wasn’t my place.’ So I asked him to fill me in.”
Later, Thompson got more details from her mother.
“I was absolutely shocked because Mom has been an open book with us. There wasn’t anything we couldn’t ask her,” Thompson said. “But I was old enough to think if this is something she didn’t tell us, there was a good reason. It was the way she had to deal with it.
“And I was respectful of her role as a woman who is a mother to other children,” Thompson said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to give up a child. So woman to woman, I could appreciate where she was coming from. I never felt ill will toward her on it.”
When the photo of the twins hit Thompson’s news feed that Sunday morning, it was because her father had seen it and knew it had to be the twins. So he reposted it, with no comments, in hopes that Thompson would see it because she was the only one who knew.
However, Thompson wasn’t the only one of Harrison’s kids to see it.
The Facebook post also made it to the news feed of her daughter, Kalyn Galvez-Latneau.
“My thought as I scrolled on past was ‘Hm. They sure look like Mom. Maybe it’s all the German genes in Green Bay that causes everyone to look alike,’” Galvez-Latneau recalled. “I didn’t think anything of it, and kept about my day.”
Harrison knew her other two kids would be stunned by the news of their siblings, but spent the rest of that Sunday and the next day telling them.
“When this happened it was a shock. I contacted each of them, Josh and Kalyn, as quickly as I was able to,” Harrison said. “I told them they had sisters and they found us. They were so awesome in their responses. They’re just really loving, caring children. There was no harsh judgement or negativity. Lex loves that she’s not the oldest one anymore.”
When Galvez-Latneau got the call from her mother saying she needed to “sit down and talk with me urgently, in person and alone,” she worried something was wrong.
Though relieved that was not the case, she wasn’t sure what to say when her mother delivered the news.
“I didn’t know how to react and I wondered how this beautiful lady must have felt holding this secret so close all these years,” Galvez-Latneau said. “I was numb and the room was spinning. My mom and I have always been super close so this was a tremendous shock.”
Galvez-Latneau had some difficulty processing the fact that her mom probably wouldn’t have told her about the twins had they not found her.
“I had to really work at letting that go and loving my mom for who she was and where she was,” Galvez-Latneau said. “It was a journey to wrap my mind and heart around this additional side to the mother I had been so close to growing up and all my adult life.”
The Sisters meet
When Hoepner’s husband gave her the message that Thompson had called, she immediately returned the call.
The women decided a conference call would be the best way for all four of them — Thompson, Harrison, Salava and Hoepner — to get acquainted.
Before that, Thompson called the registrar in Green Bay to see if there were any other twins born that day, just be be sure. There weren’t.
She also sent pictures of her mother as a teen to the twins. When they saw her picture, it “cinched the deal” — looking at her was like looking in a mirror, they said. They knew she was their mother.
They talked for two hours during the conference call that night, getting to know each other.
“There is nothing that could have gone better,” Hoepner said.
They discovered that Thompson would be in Orlando, Florida, at the same time Salava would be for work. Hoepner, Salava and Thompson arranged to meet.
“Oh man, we got along so easily,” Thompson said. “It was beautiful. I remember coming up the hotel elevator and I saw the two of them standing quite a ways down the hallway and they yelled, ‘Lex!’ And I thought ‘Why am I walking? I should be running.’ So I started running toward them. The faucets in my eyes turned on. It was an immediate connection.”
‘I never thought this day would come’
On April 1, two days before Harrison’s 70th birthday, she met her twins face-to-face for the first time.
While she waited, her daughter-in-law, Heather Harrison, sat with her, camera in hand.
“Lex texted that they were close,” Harrison recalled. “I turned and as I did, I saw the car pull in and I said ‘They’re here, Heather.’ ”
Heather grabbed the camera and filmed as San sped to the door.
Tears fell as soon as she saw the twins get out of the car. The three women embraced, looked closely at each other’s faces, and cried.
“I never thought this day would come,” Harrison told them.
The emotions were overwhelming.
“It was like when I opened the picture on the laptop. I couldn’t believe the joy in my heart,” San said. “When I stepped out there I said ‘Oh my God, it’s my girls.’ I just became a basket case for a little while. I was just overwhelmed with joy and those two precious girls came right up and hugged me, held my face and let me look at their faces ... It was just a beautiful, beautiful experience.”
They spent the next three days talking, going through pictures, comparing likes and dislikes and catching up.
Hoepner and Salava brought a disc full of photos of big moments from their childhood — going home with their adoptive parents, first communion, graduations, weddings — “everything a mom should be at,” Hoepner said.
“You could just see her drinking it in and absorbing everything,” Salava said. “It was like she was living vicariously through us. You could see she was so happy we had a great life and didn’t give us to people who didn’t really want us. It was fun to share with her. It was fun to see her laugh and see the pain on her face when she saw one of me with a broken nose at two. She was just so grateful.”
Grateful, indeed — for the parents who raised her twins and for the chance to finally be a part of her daughters’ lives.
“I am so grateful for them. You could see it on their faces — the wonderment — they had,” Harrison said. “I got to see pictures of the day they arrived, where they grew up, the things they did. They told me about times they’d sit in their room and talk quietly and try to figure out things about who their mom was. It was like an unfolding of all the years that I missed and it brought me up to the current. I got to see their lives.
“Tina did the narrating. She’s a trip and a half. The things they got into ... They just spattered it all out there so I knew who they were — the good, bad and ugly. It was just terrific.”
The twins discovered that they take after their mother’s side of the family. They have the same mannerisms, same build and same interests.
“Oh my God, Lisa looks just like San,” Salava said. “It’s just freaky to me. Thank God because we’re gonna look great at 70 if we look like her.”
“The funny thing is I hugged her first and I remember thinking she feels like Tina and when Tina hugged her it was like, ‘You feel like Lisa,’ ” Hoepner said. “We are very similar in height and size. We like the same foods and dislike the same foods. It was interesting to sit in her living room. She had the same things on her coffee table as I do ... Tina and I always thought the things we are so much alike in was because we are twins, but it was because we are like the family.”
Early Mother’s Day
On April 3, the whole family got together to celebrate Harrison’s 70th birthday. Everything flowed naturally, not only between the twins and their mother, but also with their other siblings.
“The amazing thing was when I finally met my sisters in person, their hugs, smiles and connectivity with the family was unreal,” Galvez-Latneau said. “It was as if they had always been there growing up with us, a part of the family, the entire time. We found that I looked most like Tina and had the personality most like Lisa. All of us were noticing the mannerisms which, despite being raised separately, we all shared. It was wild and fun.”
The celebration was everything Harrison ever wanted — her kids all together for a picnic at her son’s Tucson home.
Though the twins live hundreds of miles away, the family stays in close contact through texting, email and phone calls, almost daily, and plans to visit again as soon as they can.
Both twins thanked Harrison for the life they have been able to live and recognized the kindness in her decision to let them go.
“The one thing that Tina and I always talked about was what a selfless act that was,” Hoepner said. “If there was any way I could just thank her and be able to hug her and hold her and talk to her and just to know her ... this was just so much more. It gives me chills. We are so fortunate.”
That’s the part that touched Harrison most.
“I think the thing that moved me the most is they wanted to thank me for the beautiful life,” Harrison said. “They’re so selfless. They’re really, really amazing people and I know I did the right thing. I get teary-eyed every time I think about it. It just blows me away.”
