My other mother
In a surprising twist, one woman learned her birth mom wasn’t her real mom — then set out to find the parent she never knew existed
FOR 22 years, Antonia Picardi had no reason to think she was not related to her look-alike, blond-haired mom.
People were always pointing out their similarities, saying she was the perfect combination of her Swedish mother, Allene, and her late father, John, who was of Italian heritage.
So the Napa County, Calif., resident was flummoxed when she received her results from the genetics company 23andMe. They revealed that, as well as being Italian, she was a mixture of Irish, German and English stock — with nary a trace of Scandinavia.
When she raised the issue with Allene, her mother became emotional.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” her mom said. “You were conceived using a donor egg.”
Later, Picardi received an e-mail from 23andMe informing her of a relative with a 49.9 percent genetic match.
Its data indicated that a Southern California woman named Melissa Rost was her biological mother.
“I couldn’t quite believe it,” Picardi, now 24, tells The Post. “It was almost too much to take in.”
Happily, she got over her shock. She contacted Rost, who welcomed her with open arms.
“I’m a bit like her older sister,” says Rost, 47. “There’s a very special connection between us.”
The saga began in May 2017, when Picardi’s genetics professor at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., spoke to his class about hometesting kits, where samples of your saliva are sent to a laboratory and analyzed.
Picardi’s interest was piqued because she was curious to know about potential health risks in her DNA makeup, especially as her dad died from cancer when she was just 5. Meanwhile a close relative on her mom’s side had Alzheimer’s disease.
She paid $159 for the service from 23andMe and waited patiently for the results to arrive around six weeks later.
“Reading through the information, I was like, ‘Where’s the Scandinavian?’ ” says Picardi, who works at a winery in Napa Valley, Calif. “I took a screenshot and texted it to my mom saying, ‘It looks like we’re not Swedish!’ I was thinking maybe there was some cool history going on that we didn’t know about.”
The following day, Allene told her the truth in a frank conversation. It turned out she and John struggled to have another baby following the birth of their son, Gianni, in 1987. At the age of 48, Allene, who had previously suffered a miscarriage, finally became pregnant through in vitro fertilization. The couple used an egg donor who closely resembled her.
“She apparently made a promise to my dad not to tell me until ‘the time was right,’ ” says Picardi. “He didn’t want me to
feel like I was different.”
At first, she got mad. “It was like it was this big family secret and, although it affected me the most, I didn’t know about it,” Picardi says. Her brother was particularly upset on her behalf. But the duo generally understood their parents’ motives.
“I wish I’d found out sooner,” says Picardi. “But Mom kept putting it off. She had her reasons, and it was OK.”
Then, in April 2018, Picardi received a startling message from 23andMe, saying Rost was likely her mother. Her first reaction was to throw down her phone in shock.
“I started to cry a little bit,” she says. “I was thinking, ‘What do I do now?’ ”
Within hours, she e-mailed a message to Rost that got straight to the point: “Hi there, My name is Antonia. I found out I was conceived via egg donor and it looks like you are the donor.” She also did what she calls “Facebook stalking” and saw that Rost had children of her own.
There was a 24-hour period when she heard nothing back and kept refreshing her phone in the hopes Rost would reply. Then, to her relief, she got a response. “I’d be free to answer any questions you may have,” wrote Rost. “Feel free to text, e-mail or call me.”
It wasn’t long before the pair were texting and then phoning each other.
“I never imagined I’d wind up connecting to my biological daughter because of something like a home DNA test,” says Rost. “It was surreal.”
The Garden Grove, Calif., resident had twice gone through the egg donation process in her early 20s. Then a single mom of one daughter, she’d watched a TV documentary about the struggles of infertile couples. “I got pregnant really easily and wanted to help,” she tells The Post. She says she was paid between $2,500 and $5,000 for each procedure at Pacific Fertility Center in Marin County, Calif.
Rost jokingly believes the Picardis chose her as an egg donor because she was “tall, blond, skinny and cute at the time.”
Biological mother and daughter met last July at a restaurant near Rost’s home.
“We hugged for, like, two minutes,” Picardi says. “There was this immediate kinship.”
Not only did they look alike, but they used the same phrases and had similar mannerisms — resting their chins on their hands and raising their eyebrows in a sassy kind of way.
Allene met Rost at a family gathering last fall and, having given her blessing, the women’s relationship has blossomed. They recently vacationed together in San Diego along with Picardi’s boyfriend, Thomas, and Rost’s husband, Kris, and four kids.
“The last couple of years have been a whirlwind,” Picardi says. “I worried it wasn’t going to work out as well, but sharing my life with Melissa has been awesome.”