A Wonderful Reunion

Steve Flaig of Grand Rapids, Michigan, knew he’d been adopted as a baby, and when he turned 18, in 2003, he decided he’d try to track down his birth mother. The agency from which he’d been adopted gave him his mother’s name: Christine Tallady. But online searches didn’t turn up any results, and Flaig let it go.

In 2007, though, he searched for the name again online. This time, the search results included a home address near the Lowe’s store where Flaig, then 22, worked as a deliveryman.

When he mentioned the coincidence to his boss, his boss said, “You mean Chris Tallady, who works here?”

Flaig and Tallady, 45, a cashier, had said hi to each other a few times at the store, but they’d never really talked. He hadn’t even known her name. Flaig thought, There’s no possible way she’s my mother.

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For a few months, Flaig avoided Tallady. “I wasn’t sure how to approach her,” he told a local reporter. Finally, an adoption-agency employee volunteered to call Tallady for him.

When Tallady realized that the nice guy she’d been waving at was her son, she sobbed. She’d always hoped to meet her birth son one day. Later that day, mother and son talked for almost three hours at a nearby bar. She’d given him up for adoption in 1985, when she was 23. “I wasn’t ready to be a mother,” she told him.

Married with two other children, Tallady says, “I have a complete family now.”