“All those years, I’ve always wondered, ‘What kind of family did you go to?'" asked Ida Pollock, 74. "Did you have a good life?"
This reunion between a man and his mother was more than five decades in the making.
Ida Pollock, 74, of Nebraska, met her biological son Barrie Bode, 55, for the first time since given him up at birth.
“This just brings a lot of closure to my life,” Pollock told InsideEdition.com. “All those years, I’ve always wondered, ‘What kind of family did you go to? Did you have a good life?’ I’ve never shared any of this with anybody. I just kind of lived with it my whole life.”
Pollock was just 19 years old and unmarried when she became pregnant with Bode. After given it much thought, she decided to give Bode up for adoption.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life,” she recalled.
She kept it a secret for many years but eventually revealed to children she had later in life that they had another brother.
I didn’t know if he’d want to be found by his biological family or not,” Pollock’s son, Travis Mackey, 51, told InsideEdition.com,
But Bode said he grew up knowing he was adopted, and had always vowed to find his biological family.
“I always had questions about it but it was always one of those things where I said, ‘One day, I’m going to find out,’” he said.
But Bode was shocked when the reconnection came through his son, Alex Bode, 24, who took a 23 And Me DNA test and was listed as a relative for Mackey after he had taken one on Father’s Day.
“I never heard that name before, so I reached out to him trying to figure out how he’s related to me, and then I remembered that mom had given up a son for adoption,” Mackey recalled. “At first, I asked Alex, ‘Are you adopted?’ and he said, ‘No, but my dad is.’”
They each discussed with their family, and eventually discovered Alex is Mackey’s biological nephew and Pollock’s biological grandson.
“It was pretty surreal,” Alex told InsideEdition.com. “Growing up I came from a pretty small family and now to expand that exponentially was just incredible.”
The four of them met ahead of Thanksgiving for the first time after exchanging emails for months.
“Meeting in person and seeing each other and hugging each other and talking to each other for the first time in person was just an incredible experience,” Alex said. “It still doesn’t feel real.”
Bode added, “We’re really looking forward to being able to come and grow together now.”
For Pollock, she said seeing the missing side of her family together under one roof has brought closure to her life.
“A lot of the things I’ve questioned for 55 years, the answers are there,” Pollock said. “When this came up, I felt that it was just a blessing. It was closure, and it was an answer to a lot of things.”
