She claims that this week will be the first time that a former Miss Nevada who was left at an airport as a newborn and later found her biological mother in the year 2020 would finally see her in person.
In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Elizabeth Hunterton expresses that she had her first conversation with her biological mother on January 1 of this year. “It did take us quite some time to even be comfortable with that.”
The first time Hunterton, now 44 years old, talked to PEOPLE was in 2021, only a few months after she had made her first contact with her real mother. It had been decades since she had been discovered by two pilots at a Nevada airport in January 1980, when she was around ten days old.
Although Hunterton concedes that there were periods when she “was a good maybe year and a half where she just wouldn’t respond to any of my messages,” she believes that this “was part of her healing journey.” Hunterton has been exchanging text messages and short emails with her biological mother since the year 2020.
According to Hunterton, the two eventually spoke over the phone this past January.
She remembers saying: “We just said, ‘I think if we’re going to start this year by proving to ourselves that we can do hard things and not letting fear win, let’s just talk on the phone.'”
It is said by Hunterton that their conversation “blew her mind.”
“It was like, I remember you — and it was just this really weird, unsettling moment,” she adds, recalling how she felt. She was referring to the fact that she felt as if she recognized the voice of her biological mother. “I guess I just didn’t expect to recognize it, and it was very sweet, talking to her.”
“She was like, ‘You know, you are the last person I ever expected to hear from, but I’m so happy you found me,'” In addition, Hunterton says.
According to a previous story by PEOPLE, Hunterton, who was elected Miss Nevada in 2004 and has worked for the group as CEO, was brought up in Reno by a white family and was unsure of who she was until she started working for the organization.
Using DNA databases, she was able to locate her biological father in the year 2018, however she discovered that he had passed away in the year 2004.
As a result of the few hits that her online DNA profile received in March of 2020, she sought out to three other women in the hopes that they would be a match. However, she discovered that these ladies were simply cousins and not her mother.
After that, she was eventually able to get in touch with her original mother, whose name she has not given to the public. This was made possible by her connection with a biological second cousin.
According to Hunterton, in the end, she was able to discover the truth about her biological parents, which was that her father was of African descent, her mother was of Japanese descent, and her abandonment was not deliberate.
“I didn’t have the physical, emotional, mental, or financial capability to care for you in the way that you deserved, so I gave you to my friend, and she was supposed to take you to an adoption agency,” Hunterton says of the email she received from her biological mother when they first connected. “I gave you to my friend because I didn’t have the ability to care for you in the way that you deserved.” “I did not handle the situation very well when I discovered that she had left you at the airport,” she said. As a result, she was taken aback. It wasn’t until eight months later that she found out that I had been abandoned at the airport.
As of right now, Hunterton is speculating that her mother’s friend attempted to take her to an adoption agency, but “the adoption agencies wouldn’t take me because it was harder to place a Black baby.”
She has said that she has not been successful in locating the lady who abandoned her, but she has stated that her biological mother “really tortured herself because of that.”
“Once I found her, she said, ‘You know, now that I know that you’re okay, would it be okay if I allowed myself to live?” What I’m trying to say is, “Girl, enjoy your life. Fly, you little bird. Enjoy the greatest life you can. You are engaging in self-inflicted suffering over a matter that I have never considered to be anything that requires forgiveness.
Hunterton, who claims that she has developed a strong relationship with her second cousin and other distant relatives that she has met via her extensive genealogical study, found out that her birth mother’s family held a reunion at which she was not invited, much to the dismay of her cousin. This information was revealed to her after they had their first phone chat together.
“I don’t know that I would be entirely comfortable with attending a family reunion where everybody is,” admits Hunterton in his interview. “That is a bunch all at once. “It’s time,” she had said before. I believe that you need to talk to her. She must come and talk to you. Let’s make this happen, shall we?’…
The reunion of Hunterton, her husband, and her family, including her biological mother, is scheduled to take place this coming weekend “in a neutral territory.”
“They rented a house, so that way, if either of us just needs space, if we need to go for a walk or we need to just go someplace and not be around people, we can do that,” she explains further.
The trip that Hunterton took to get to that reunion, in addition to the painstaking search that she conducted to locate her mother, has provided her with the chance to tell her story on TikTok.
“As I was having a conversation with my closest buddy, she started by saying, ‘You know what? There is a tremendous deal of universality in your tale, despite the fact that it is one of a kind, because, at the end of the day, it is about identification,’ she adds. “‘You have this superpower of helping people feel seen'”
Just around 130,000 people are now following Hunterton. “When I talked to my therapist about it, he said that that would be a really helpful part of my healing journey, to just learn how to talk about it,” Hunterton recalls in an interview. “That was the reason I joined that platform. You know, I wasn’t anticipating it to behave in the way that it did.
Hunterton adds that there are “threads of happiness” in her life as she unpacks her past and thinks about the forthcoming reunion, but she also acknowledges that there is a lot of worry in her life.
“While it might be unlikely, I’m scared that she will be disappointed or wish I had become something more or something different,” Hunterton is quoted as saying. “Nobody wants to be a disappointment or fall short of what somebody’s hopes and expectations were, especially when they paid so dearly for them.”
However, there is a sense of joy for Hunterton, her children, and her husband with this news.
“[My husband] knows that we’re closing a loop here or maybe opening another one,” she adds in response. “Who knows?”