Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited by Anais Bordier, Samantha Futerman Read Free Book Online Page B

Facebook postings were mentioning her father’s birthday, so even he was becoming real. How cool was it that her dad and my mum had almost the same birthday! Just one day apart.
    During my first call to them since the discovery, I had been almost crying, because I had finally made contact with Samantha. During the second call, I had been shouting at Mum to send my birth records as fast as she could, so I could send them to Samantha. Sam had sent me hers, and I wanted to send her mine. By the third phone call, I was out of my mind with glee. I told Mum to send me some of my baby pictures, so I could share them with Sam. My father was becoming quite moved by the whole thing, even though he had been the last holdout. I was his little girl and his only child, so he was having a hard time imagining two identical “me”s.
    My father had come from a large family. He grew up ona small farm in the central Loire Valley in a tiny village between the cities of Orléans and Chartres. My grandfather, Gaston Bordier, was a wheat farmer. With his wife, Madeleine, they had five children, my father being the oldest boy. He had an older sister, two younger sisters, and a younger brother. He loved growing up on the farm, and he worked alongside his father wherever he needed help. He wanted to go to university, travel, learn languages, and maybe become an academic. He was a bit of a perfectionist. Everything he undertook, he wanted to do well. His first job was with Air France, but he went to school at the same time. When he finished his studies and passed all his university exams, he held various executive positions, which later gave him the idea of having his own business. He finally took over a leather goods company, which he positioned in the luxury segment.
    My mother was hardworking, too. She was the perfect right-hand woman when my parents purchased the business. She grew up in Troyes, a beautiful medieval city in the Champagne region southeast of Paris by one hundred kilometers. Her father, Jacques Wach, was a successful accountant. My grandfather and my grandmother, Simone, had two children. My mother was five and a half years older than her brother, Gilles.
    Gilles is now a monsignor in the Catholic Church and runs a seminary that he established himself outside of Florence. My mum has a great story about how young my uncle had been when he knew he had a calling from God. The family used to go to church occasionally, although they weren’t particularly devout. They had a country house near Troyes where they went in the summers, and one day after mass, my mother saw Uncle Gilles in the garden near the house. He was five years old at the time. He had taken all my mother’sdolls and arranged them so they were all looking toward him. He was wearing my grandmother’s black skirt like a robe and was performing Mass for the dolls. My mother ran to get my grandmother, who asked him what he was playing.
    “
Non
, Maman, I’m not playing,” he said. “I will be priest one day.”
    As he predicted, my uncle was ordained into the Roman Catholic Church. John Paul II performed his ordination in 1979, when my uncle was twenty-three years old. When I was baptized, it was Uncle Gilles who did the honor.
    My mother enjoyed a pampered girlhood. She rode and jumped horses, beginning at age twelve. She even had her own horse. When I began riding at age eight, she would often ride with me. Every summer in her youth, my mother’s family went to the South of France, either to the Mediterranean or the Atlantic Coast. Mum was really smart and well educated, and attended university in England. She met my dad at a party in Paris. It was love at first sight. They had many things in common, and they knew right away they had found their partner for life.
    My parents were married in 1976 in Troyes. They wanted to start a family, but not right away, not before they had a good financial standing. When they tried to conceive a baby several years later, they were