Annette Driver was 19 and a college freshman when she became pregnant.
"And the lights dimmed from that point right there," she recalled last week.
Against her parents' advice, Annette decided to let someone adopt the baby - a girl - after she was born in St. Louis.
"Over the years, I was trying to figure out, "How does a person let go of their flesh and blood?'" Annette said last week. "I know that, for the first six years, I tried to forget it."
But at the time, she felt letting her daughter go to another family would be better for the child.
Her mother, DeLois Driver, said last week that part of the story is hard to talk about.
"(Annette) didn't want to put a burden on me, but she already had," DeLois recalled.
In a July 22, 2013, News Tribune "Portrait," Annette, for the first time, spoke publicly about the baby and the adoption.
"I try to mentor to young people about making good decisions," she said then. "I just always want young people to be so very careful - because it can take just one situation like that to put you off track, and then it takes many (situations) to get back on."
She reported she actively was looking to find and reconnect with that daughter.
That search ended this past April - and Annette Driver and her mother spent Mother's Day in St. Louis with Aileen Woods, now 38, and her son, Domonick Brown, 17.
DeLois said she'd been praying for years that the family would find Aileen.
When DeLois was first told Heather Dodd - a "search angel" and founder of the Missouri Adoptive Rights Movement - thought she'd made the connection, DeLois said, "I couldn't believe it - because we'd tried so long and so hard (and hit) so many brick walls."
Then the happiness flooded in, and there were excited phone calls among various family members.
And there was the trip to St. Louis.
"We woke up Mother's Day morning in Aileen's apartment," DeLois recalled, "and the birds were chirping. The sun was shining.
"And I said, "God, you made this day just for us!'"
Aileen said she "wasn't excited (or) intimidated" by that get-together.
"I can articulate now that I feel rescued," she said. "I feel like I belong. I feel rooted."
Aileen said she didn't know she was adopted until she was 17.
"I didn't feel anything because I was in a dysfunctional situation," she recalled, explaining that her adoptive parents were having troubles of their own, and life in their home was not going well.
"I started looking at them in a more judgmental way," she said, adding she no longer has contact with them or her adoptive brother.
But, even with all that, Aileen said she was not looking for her birth family.
"I wasn't really focused on who gave me up and why," she said last week. "None of that mattered to me - I was in a traumatic situation and couldn't even figure out how to survive that."
Later - about eight or nine years after her son was born - she said, "It started becoming important to me to know where I came from, and I called around to some hospitals and going with some very limited information."
Aileen said her adoptive mother "wouldn't tell me anything and made it very, very uncomfortable to approach her with anything. She would shut the conversation down. She didn't want me to know."
But her search was based on "me realizing that I'm not rooted. The adoptive parents were the only parents I knew, and for most of my 20s, I was dealing with "was I going to hold on to that relationship?'
"There wasn't any energy to look for someone else."
Aileen had stopped searching in recent years, even though her son occasionally would come to her and say, "Mom, you need a family," she recalled.
Domonick said he "couldn't believe it at first," when Dodd contacted Aileen, and she told him, "I think I found my Momma."
During that first call between Aileen and Annette, he said, "My mom could barely talk because she was crying."
He admitted he almost cried, but said, "I don't like crying."
Domonick added, "The truth is that, my whole life I didn't really have a family ... and I didn't care any more."
Finding the Driver family has meant a lot, Domonick said, but it still is hard to develop relationships with people you haven't known until just a few months ago.
"I've seen people not take advantage of their families, and thought, "You are so lucky that you have a family, when I've grown up with nothing,'" he said.
Domonick spent the last month staying with Annette and getting to know his new family - an experience that hasn't answered all his questions.
"I know that I have a family that's going to love me, now," he said last week, "but I still have to adapt to having one.
"I'm not used to it, so I don't really know how to act."
It's more like a work-in-progress, he said.
Aileen has determined she needed them, after this year's reunion with the Drivers.
Annette's search for Aileen didn't go smoothly all the time, and she halted the effort several times along the way.
She'd been searching, unsuccessfully, since Aileen was 18, Annette said.
"Birth mothers already get treated badly," she said. "So, when we called someone up and said, "I'm trying to find my daughter who I placed for adoption,' they say - in so many words - "Well, you made a decision'" a long time ago, and shouldn't change it now.
As a lobbyist, Annette Driver represents Heather Dodd's Missouri Adoptive Rights Movement and expects to keep working on efforts to make adoptions a more open process.
But it was her lobbying work this year on a different issue that led to the search's end.
Rep. Don Phillips, R-Kimberling City, told Annette she should work with Dodd and, during a conversation about her lobbying work, Annette said Dodd told her, "I can help you find your daughter."
Dodd said it only took her a few days.
"With Annette's case, we were able to narrow it down with some public records," she explained last week. "It helped that she knew some information about the adoptive family. She knew that her daughter was adopted by a bi-racial couple, and so in the end, we were trying to narrow it down to who could possibly be the correct person that fit all that information."
Annette said she's "happy but guarded" and is "trying to be sensible about everything" with the new changes in her life.
"But the connection is very natural," she said.
She added, "The pain of not having my family was greater than the need to keep a secret."
DeLois Driver said the biggest lesson she's learned is, "If you get the chance - any young girl who's in trouble - keep your child, if there's any chance that you can.
"It's unnatural to give a child up - and then go through all we went through to try to find her."
Aileen said, "At this point, I just want my family.
"And I just want to let go of, and forget about, what I've been through."
Domonick Brown said he's just happy.
"I just want people to know that they need to take advantage of having a family because it does not feel good to not have one."