The news these days is often depressing at worst and frustrating at best. It’s easy to let it get us down. Never fear… The News Blender has you covered. Once a week we feature Something Good and, in return, all you have to do is tell us something good that has happened to you this week, something you are thankful for, a joke, a cute animal story, an inspiring tale of heroics, a Random Act of Kindness… SOMETHING good.
Today’s Something Good is finding good in a terrible mistake.
On December 31, 1998 in a Sicilian hospital, two young mothers gave birth to baby girls 15 minutes apart. When the babies were brought to them when it was time to go home, Marinella Alagna and Gisella Fodera both noticed their daughters were wearing different clothes than the mothers had picked out, according to Upworthy. Assured that was simply a mix up, they took their daughters home.
Years passed and the girls ended up going to the same preschool. One day, when Marinella was picking up 3 year-old Melissa, she noticed Caterina looked just like her other daughters. She recognized Gisella from the maternity ward and got suspicious. They took DNA tests and discovered the hospital’s mistake was more than dressing the girls in the wrong clothes. They had been switched at birth. “It was too surreal, too impossible,” Marinella said.
Instead of fighting over the girls or just switching them back, they decided to raise them together. They spent birthdays, weekends, and holidays together. The families even moved in together in order to share the responsibility and joy of raising Caterina and Melissa. Marinella and Gisella were mothers to both and the girls were raised as sisters. They essentially had four parents and eight grandparents.
“At first, loving Melissa, my biological daughter, felt like betraying the daughter I had raised, but today Melissa and I truly feel like mother and daughter,” Gisella said.
The girls were told about their unique situation when they were eight and they seem to have taken no harm from it. The biggest issue appears to be figuring out how to deal with their legal names.
“It seemed like a game and today neither of us have any memory of life before we were three,” Melissa said. “Growing up I had Marinella as a second mother, as she still is.”
Deciding to make a terrible mistake of this magnitude into a double blessing is definitely something good.
Now it’s your turn… Tell me something good.
