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At least once a week, Vamarr Hunter would stop by the Give Me Some Sugah bakery in Chicago for breakfast or a sweet treat — usually a lemon bar or a chocolate chip cookie. The cafe was warm and welcoming, and he enjoyed chatting with the owner when she was behind the counter.

“I loved the service; I loved the products,” said Hunter, who lived down the street from the bakery. “The pancakes are the best I ever had, period.”

Hunter, 50, was a loyal customer for several years before he realized the real significance the bakery had in his life. It wasn’t until he got a phone call in March 2022 that everything changed.

“I was on the phone talking to my friend when a call came through from the bakery,” said Hunter, adding that he had saved the bakery’s number in his contacts. “I was like, ‘Why is Give Me Some Sugah calling me?’”

Lenore Lindsey — the bakery’s owner — was on the line. She was calling to tell her longtime patron something shocking: She was his birth mother.

They both said the call was a blur. Lindsey remembers opening by saying, “Is this Vamarr Hunter?” She initially didn’t recognize his name as one of her customers.

He said “yes,” still confused why the bakery was calling.

Hunter had been expecting a call from his birth mother, whom he was trying to track down. That was when he connected the dots.

At the same time, they both realized the incredible coincidence. Then they got loud.

“When I knew who he was, we just started screaming on the phone,” Lindsey said. “We were beside ourselves.”

“It was crazy,” Hunter said. “It was just so unbelievable.”

Lindsey gave birth to Hunter in 1974, when she was 17. She made the wrenching decision to put him up for adoption.

“It was heartbreaking,” said Lindsey, now 67. “It was a difficult time for my family.”

Lindsey never saw her son’s face when he was born, she said, because it would have been too hard to let him go.

“They wheeled him out, and I remember seeing a head full of hair and my mom telling me how beautiful he was,” she said between tears.

In the years that followed, Lindsey tried to move on without dwelling on what happened.

“I was trying to get back to normal, back to being a teenage girl,” she said. “I just suppressed it, pushed it down and went forward. I deeply compartmentalized.”

Nearly five decades later, Lindsey — who went on to have one daughter, Rachel, now 40 — got a call from a genealogist, letting her know that her son was looking for her. The woman passed along his number.

“I said, ‘I’m not ready for this one,’” recalled Lindsey, who was recovering from breast cancer surgery at the time and about to undergo chemotherapy.

Lindsey decided to call her son and planned to offer to meet him later that year, once she was in better health.

But after Hunter and Lindsey realized that they weren’t strangers after all, they decided to meet up sooner.

Lenore Lindsey

Hunter, for his part, was utterly stunned by the news.

“It was kind of numbing for a while,” he said.

Hunter described his childhood as difficult.

“It was rough,” he said, explaining that he didn’t feel comfortable going into the details. He didn’t know he was adopted until age 35, though he remembered feeling like an outsider in his home.

One morning in March 2022, while watching TV, he saw a show that made him pause to think about his upbringing and adoption.

He spoke with a friend who encouraged him to investigate his adoption story and find his birth mother. He got in touch with Gabriella Vargas, a genetic genealogist based in California, and she was able to track down Lindsey.

“He had a high match in his Ancestry matches, and it was easy to build the family tree and figure it out from there,” said Vargas, noting that Hunter had done DNA testing and uploaded it to Ancestry.com but needed help interpreting his results.

Once Vargas determined that Lindsey was Hunter’s mother, she called Lindsey, and that same day, Lindsey reached out to her long-lost son — who, unbeknownst to her, wasn’t truly lost. He had stood across from her and enjoyed her baked goods for years. His laugh had always reminded her of her brother’s. Now she knew why.

“We had an immediate connection,” Lindsey said. “All the pieces had fallen into place.”

“The whole story was insane. … She was already a mother figure to him,” Vargas said. “This needs to be a movie.”

About a week later, the mother and son met up in person — and they’ve been inseparable since. Their story was <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/afternoon-edition-november-8-2024" target=_blank>first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times</a>.

Right away, Hunter began calling Lindsey “mother” and “ma.” Hunter kept her company during her chemo appointments.

“I started coming down to the bakery more,” he said. “I was always one of these kids that’s doing their own thing, and now it’s like I belong.”

Shortly after they reunited, Lindsey had a stroke in June 2022. Hunter stepped up to help her manage the bakery, working night shifts to ensure all the baked goods were ready for the morning.

“I noticed that she wasn’t doing well after a few days of working,” Hunter said. “I just wanted to try to see what I could do.”

Lindsey contemplated closing the bakery, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“I didn’t want to close it down because it’s been in the community for so long,” said Lindsey, who opened the bakery in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood in 2008.

In April, Hunter — who worked in the logistics industry for 18 years — quit his job to run the bakery full-time with his mother, who has mostly stepped back from her everyday duties.

“I’m loving every minute of it,” he said. “It’s pretty therapeutic for me.”

Often spending days together, the mother and son have noticed how alike they are.

“He talks like he was raised in the house with us,” Lindsey said. “We’re both the same.”

Lindsey — whose phone background is a photo of her two children, Hunter and Rachel — says she and her son were always meant to reconnect.

Courtesy of Lenore Lindsay

“It’s like every part of my life had led me up to this point,” she said. “The fact that we found each other is amazing, a great joy, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

“It’s a piece of me that was missing,” he said. “It has changed us both tremendously.”

McGill University, BA

Columbia University, MS in journalism 

Sydney Page is a staff reporter who writes for The Washington Post’s Inspired Life section, a collection of stories about humanity. She has been a contributor to The Post since 2018.

Sydney Page

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