This mom and daughter reunited after 40 years and it will absolutely melt your heart. There is no question that maternal love transcends all…

Nancy Womac has waited four decades to meet her daughter, and there hasn’t been even one day where she didn’t think of the child that had been taken from her.

When Nancy was a girl, her grandparents raised her and their siblings until they were no longer able to. It was at that point that Womac went to an orphanage in Dalton, Georgia.

It was at 16 that she found out that she was pregnant with the child of a young man that she had fallen in love with at that orphanage, so they sent her to a home for unwed mothers called Bethesda Home for Girls in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Womac had desperately wanted to keep her baby but she did not have any power to do anything about it. She and many of the other women from Bethesda have now come forward and discussed their allegations of physical from the organization, which closed in 1987. Two weeks before her due date, they flew Womac to East Ridge, Tennessee and in June 1979 she gave birth to a baby girl that she never even got to see.

I remember going into labor, and they just give me a shot and put me out,” she said when she was on ‘Today.'”

“I don’t remember having her. I don’t remember them wheeling me into the delivery room. I don’t remember nothing.”

The years to follow would see Womac trying desperately to find her daughter, only to encounter dead leads everywhere she went. She would ultimately find out that the child had been adopted through a closed adoption and the parents worked as missionaries in South Africa and Indonesia.

Still, that didn’t deter Womac from dreaming of the day that she would meet her stolen daughter. She even kept mental track of all of the milestones that her daughter would be hitting, and even made a cake every year on her birthday.

Meanwhile, Melanie Spencer had grown up and known that she had been adopted all along. There was even one point where the adoption records had been opened up and she considered tracking down her birth mother, but she thought better of it.

She ended up thinking that maybe her mother had moved on or just simply wasn’t interested in reconnecting, so she let it go.

However, Spencer would eventually have two children of her own, and as they grew older, she realized that she didn’t have much to tell them about their background because she just didn’t know that much. She decided that it was time for her to take a DNA test.

“I really started thinking about what I will tell them about where they’re from,” she said. “I decided to do Ancestry. The most interesting part was that it came up with a DNA match. It had been almost 40 years, and I thought, ‘Why not?’”

The match wasn’t with Womac herself, but with her sister, Cheryl Blackwell, who would be Spencer’s aunt. However, Blackwell didn’t see Spencer’s message for a little over a year. Eventually, Blackwell and Spencer began corresponding and she was able to connect her with her biological mother. Spencer and Womac began building a bond on Facebook little by little.

Then came a moment almost 40 years in the making, one where Spencer would drive down to meet her mother and siblings for the first time.

“The drive down, … I was kind of anxious,” Spencer told People magazine. “And then I got out of the car and there she was.

“Forty-two years of questions — it almost feels like there wasn’t any missing time. It feels like coming home.”

There is no question that mother and daughter had a lot of catching up to do and still have a lot more catching up to do, but the good news is that their initial wound is now healing.

“She’s just what I thought she would be,” Womac said through tears. “She’s beautiful. She’s smart.”