A Chicago man discovers that the owner of his favorite bakery is actually his mother, and now runs the business with her.
“I was talking on the phone with a friend and I got a call from a bakery. I thought, 'Why is Give Me Some Sugah calling me?'” said Vamar Hunter, 50. Ta. washington post It was the spring of 2022, the moment he received that fateful phone call.
Hunter said he visited Give Me Some Sugar at least once a week and had the bakery's phone number saved on his cell phone.
The person on the other end of the phone was Lenore Lindsey, the owner of the bakery.
Neither she nor Hunter remember exactly what happened next, but Lindsey remembers it starting with the words, “Is this Vamar Hunter?”
At the time, she told The Washington Post that she didn't realize the name was one of her most loyal customers.
Hunter was waiting for a call from her birth mother and was tracking her. The two immediately hit it off.
“When we found out who he was, we started screaming on the phone. We were beside ourselves,” Lindsay recalled.
“It was crazy. It was just unbelievable,” Hunter agreed.
Lindsay, now 67, was just 17 when she gave birth to Hunter in 1974.
Lindsey said the decision to put her baby up for adoption was “heartbreaking.”
“It was a difficult time for the family,” she added, recalling that when Vamar was born, she refused to hold him or see him because it was harder to let him go.
“They drove him out. I remember seeing his head full of hair and my mother telling me how beautiful he was,” she recalled tearfully.
Meanwhile, Hunter described her childhood as “rough,” but declined to elaborate.
He didn't know he was adopted until he was 35, but remembers feeling “out of place” in his own home.
In March 2022, he watched a TV show about family trees and became interested in learning more about his adoption history and tracing his birth mother.
He tracked Lindsay down with the help of California-based genetic genealogist Gabriela Vargas.
“He had a high match rate with Ancestry Match, and it was easy to build a family tree and figure it out from there,” Vargas told The Washington Post.
Once Vargas had pieced together that Lindsey was Hunter's biological mother, he called her and gave her his number.
“I said, 'I'm not ready for this,'” Lindsay recalled.
At the time, she was recovering from breast cancer surgery and preparing to undergo chemotherapy.
Despite her concerns, she planned to call Hunter later that day and offer to meet when she felt better.
However, when she realized that she and Hunter already knew each other, they postponed their reunion until just a week later.
Lindsay said Hunter's laughter always reminded her of her brother's. And now he knows why.
“We connected right away. All the pieces fell into place,” Lindsey said of their bond. First covered by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Hunter soon began calling Lindsey “Mom” and “Mommy” and going to her chemotherapy appointments together.
“I go to the bakery more often,” he said.
“I was always one of those kids doing my own thing, but now I feel like I belong.”
“The whole story was insane. … She was already like a mother to him,” Vargas interjected. “This needs to be made into a movie.”
Lindsay suffered a stroke in June 2022, shortly after getting back together with Hunter.
While she recovered, Hunter began helping run the bakery, even working the night shift to make sure everything was ready for the morning.
Lindsay, who opened Give Me Some Sugah in 2008, didn't want to close the bakery.
In April of this year, Hunter officially quit his job and began running the business full time.
“I'm loving every minute of it,” he said. “It's quite therapeutic for me.”
Lindsay also has a 40-year-old daughter, Rachel. She said Hunter quickly integrated into the family.
“He speaks like he grew up in our house,” Lindsey said. “We're both the same.”
“It seems like every part of my life has led me to this point,” she added. “The fact that we found each other is amazing and a great joy and I wouldn't trade it for anything.”
“That's what I was missing,” Hunter agreed.
“It changed us both a lot.”
