Woman Switched at Birth Celebrates Birthday with Biological Mom After Decades-Long Search (Exclusive)

"I always knew this day would happen," Diane Bazella tells PEOPLE in this week's issue

For as long as she can remember, Diane Bazella has been consumed by the dream of spending her birthday with the woman who gave birth to her and placed her for adoption.

“I was always thinking about her, wondering what she looked like and if maybe I had just walked past her and never even knew it,” recalls Bazella. “And my birthday was the one day out of the year that I knew for sure that we were both thinking about each other.”

The long-held dream came true one afternoon last September, when Bazella turned 63 and celebrated her birthday alongside birth mom Sherri Geerts, 81, with a long lunch and shopping in Bazella’s hometown of Minnetonka, Minn. “I just always had this knowing that the two of us would meet,” says Bazella. “I always knew this day would happen.”

What Bazella never imagined was how long it would take and how complex the journey would be. “If it hadn’t happened to me, I probably wouldn’t believe it.” Her search began at age 5 when her parents, Walter and Ila Peterson, told her she had been adopted. From that moment on, she asked questions and searched in what would become a decades-long genealogical goose chase.

And by the time she found her way to Geerts, Bazella had spent nearly 40 years convinced that two people she tracked down in the 1980s — including the woman whose name was on her birth certificate — were her biological parents. But it was in 2021, after questions about the results of a DNA test had led to years of amateur detective work, that Bazella not only located her birth mother but also unearthed a shocking revelation: She and another infant had been switched shortly after their births at a hospital for unwed mothers in 1960.

“I feel like I’m finally home,” says Bazella, still ecstatic to have learned the truth. “I have that bond I was searching for.”

Related: Two Oklahoma Women Make Shocking DNA Discovery: 'We Were Switched at Birth'

Raised in Edina, Minn., Bazella says her loving adoptive parents’ decision to tell their little girl how she’d come into their lives at 9 months old changed the trajectory of her life. “I felt different from that day on,” she says.

In an age before the Internet and at-home DNA tests, Bazella was 23 years old in 1983 when she finally tracked down what she believed was her original birth certificate and located the two people who she assumed were her biological parents. “It was amazing,” Bazella says. “I felt like this journey that I’d been on since I was a little girl was finally over.”

She learned that she’d been adopted in 1961, months after her biological mom, then 18, had given birth at the Booth Memorial Hospital in St. Paul, Minn. Both parents, who had eventually gone their separate ways and both had children in other marriages, warmly welcomed her into their lives.

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“One of the first things my mom told me was, ‘I named you Kelly Jean,’ ” recalls Bazella. Although she was always puzzled by her lack of resemblance to either of the pair, “for the next 39 years I thought my given name was Kelly Jean. I even named my daughter Kelly.”

When the woman she believed was her birth mom died from cancer in 2000, Bazella was heartbroken but grateful for the time they’d spent together. Still, she couldn’t stop wondering why she didn’t feel a deeper bond with her.

In 2017, hoping to learn more about genealogy and curious if her birth father might have had other children, she bought an at-home DNA test kit. The results were a surprise: None of the names on her genealogy report matched any of her known relatives.

By 2021 Bazella — who had spent four years reaching out to people on the test report, trying unsuccessfully to understand how they might be related — decided to circle back to one of the women who was listed as a close DNA match. “Back when I emailed her,” says Bazella, “she wasn’t sure if I was some sort of scam artist and wasn’t comfortable sharing her personal life with a stranger.”

Bazella apologized for contacting her again but explained that she had an unshakable hunch that the two of them had the same biological father. The woman was stunned but hours later emailed her back to inform her that she’d just confronted her father about Bazella’s theory — and that her hunch was correct. The woman’s dad confessed that he’d fathered another baby girl in 1960 with a woman no longer in his life named Sherri Nordlie.

For a moment Bazella was stumped. “My mom’s name isn’t Sherri,” she remembers thinking. “Then all of a sudden I realized everything I’d believed for all those years was wrong.” The woman and the man she knew as her biological mom and dad weren’t really her birth parents. But how could that be? Bazella had another hunch: “I’d been switched at birth with another baby at the hospital.”

In the days that followed, the remaining pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Bazella called another woman who had appeared on her DNA report whom she had befriended. When she explained that she had recently learned that her birth father had had another child with a woman then named Sherri Nordlie, the woman said, “That’s my cousin!” And that cousin, as a subsequent DNA test confirmed, was Bazella’s real biological mom, Sherri Geerts.

Ever since Geerts first telephoned Bazella on Christmas Day 2021 — shortly after Geerts’ husband of 62 years died — the long-separated mother and daughter have remained in constant contact. Once a day they email each other (“I write her each morning,” says Bazella, “and she emails me each night”), and they rarely talk on the phone for less than five hours at a stretch.

Every few months Bazella flies out to visit her birth mom at her home in Sunnyvale, Calif., or Geerts flies to see her. “We’re definitely making up for lost time,” says Geerts, who has three grown sons. “I never gave up hope that I’d find her someday.”

Related: 2 Okla. Women Learn They Were Switched at Birth 57 Years Ago After Taking DNA Tests 

Bazella has also struck up a relationship her birth father — 83-year-old Victor Rebeck — who telephones his daughter from his home in San Clemente, Calif., at least once a week. “This has been a life-changing experience for me,” he says. “It’s been a godsend.”

Since her discovery, Bazella has gotten to know the birth parents she spent her life searching for, along with her four half siblings. But there have also been bittersweet moments. “I had to call the woman I spent all those years thinking was my sister and tell her, ‘I’m so sorry, but I’m not really your sister.’ We were both in shock for months.” (The two have still remained in touch.)

Bazella is also hoping to one day track down the woman she was switched with shortly after they were born two and a half hours apart on Sept. 29, 1960.

“If she were ever to look for her birth mother, she would have found my real birth mother,” says Bazella. “But since she has never searched for her, we don’t know who she is.”

But for now, Bazella says, she’s the luckiest woman alive. “I’m still grieving all those years I didn’t have with them,” Bazella says. “But I feel like I hit the jackpot to finally have them in my life.”

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