By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
After 15 years apart, Deidra Robertson, 21, and Norma Baiter, 39, live together.

The moment before she reunited with her mother, Deidra Robertson thought she’d throw up.

Sitting in her boyfriend’s pickup, she flapped her hands to fan her face and peeked through the curtains of the South Carolina motel where her mother waited.

Inside, she saw Norma Baiter, her mother, doing the same.

It had been 15 years.

Deidra was 4 years old when her mother left. Her parents’ marriage had crumbled. A judge had given custody of Deidra and her little sister, Mandi, to their father’s parents.

Norma, frightened of her ex-husband, fled to Maine.

“You would never know the feeling,” Norma recalled. “It was like a death.”

Deidra never knew.

She and Mandi moved into their Granny and Papa’s house in the one-stop-light Georgia town of Twin City.

“My father was in and out of the picture,” Deidra said. “My grandparents raised us.”

Questions, questions

Within a year of the divorce, their father had remarried, divorced and married again. The girls grew accustomed to new women in their lives. As they entered school, though, they began asking questions about their mother.

“You’d get a kind of knowing silence,” Deidra said. “You knew you weren’t supposed to ask. They’d give us a one-word answer or change the subject.”

They knew they had a mother. And it made strangers intriguing.

In Wal-Mart with her grandparents, Deidra would examine the faces of women. She’d look for familiar features.

“I’d wonder if that’s my mom,” she said.

And when her grandparents were away, she’d search for clues.

She was about 10 when she discovered her parents’ wedding album in the top of her grandfather’s closet.

She marveled at how young they both looked, her father and his pretty 17-year-old bride. She secretly shared it with her sister and her friends at school.

“I hid it everywhere,” Deidra said. Then, she questioned her grandmother.

“How old were they?” she asked. “When were they married?”

Her grandmother answered. Then, she shooed Deidra away.

Deidra later learned bits about her mom, particularly that she’d moved north. She also learned that everyone else in the town of 2,000 seemed to know the story.

Friends’ parents had known her parents, she said. “My principal lived across the street and he knew.”

“Eventually, I just got more stubborn,” Deidra said of her search. “I was going to meet her.”

By the time she reached high school, she’d begun writing Oprah Winfrey, hoping the celebrity would help.

She once paid an Internet search company $75. They took her money and gave her the name of an unrelated woman in the Midwest.

All that changed when she was 19, a high school graduate and working for a lawyer. One night, she typed her mother’s name and the few other stats she’d gathered over the years into the lawyer’s computer. A moment later, one of the databases he subscribed to had an answer.

She found her mother living in Wales, Maine. The next day she called the phone number that had appeared on the screen.

Norma was working when her husband, Rob, phoned and told her Deidra had called. She broke down in tears, left work and returned the call.

When she finally heard her daughter’s voice, she collapsed onto the floor beside her bed.

In all the intervening years, she never stopped yearning for her daughters.

She filled journals with one-sided conversations with her girls. She wrote letters she never sent. On their birthdays, she baked cakes and sang “Happy Birthday,” first by herself and then with her new husband, Rob and their two children.

That first phone call with Deidra lasted four and a half hours.

Within a couple of days, Norma, Rob and their daughter, Danah, Deidra’s half-sister, drove to Beaufort, S.C.

There, about 90 minutes north of Twin City, Deidra and Norma finally met.

Like Deidra, Norma said she was too nervous to move when she heard her daughter had pulled up and was sitting outside in a truck.

Then, Danah ran into the parking lot.

A moment later, Norma followed. Though she knew better, she still expected to see a 4-year-old girl.

“Instead, I saw a beautiful young woman,” she said. They held each other and cried.

“Rivers flowed in that parking lot,” Norma said.

Happy Anniversary

That was two years ago. Last Wednesday, Norma and Deidra celebrated the second anniversary of their reunion.

Within a few months of that meeting, Deidra moved to Wales. She’s still here, attending business school in Lewiston and working in an office.

Mandi, who is a year younger, stayed behind.

“She wasn’t ready,” Deidra said.

Deidra and her mother learned they share lots of the same loves: racing, theater, movies.

“You can’t explain it,” Deidra said, sitting close to her mom. “I can talk to her and see her every day.”

The challenge now is to stay together.

Though she likes Maine, it’s too cold, Deidra said. And she’s not ready to settle down.

“Someday, I’ll have to leave,” she said, turning to her mother. “Don’t you think so?”

“No,” Norma said. “You can’t.”