CHICAGO -- Lenore Lindsey did not consider herself a baker when she opened Give Me Some Sugah at age 50 in 2008. Neither did Vamarr Hunter when he took over the South Shore bakery this year at the same age.

The late-in-life knack for baking isn’t the only parallel in their stories, first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times. Hunter never dreamed he’d be running a bakery when he first walked into Give Me Some Sugah over a decade ago, nor that the chef behind his favorite creations might be his birth mother.

The mother and son met as shop owner and customer in 2010 when Hunter and his then-fiancee began frequenting the neighborhood bakery at 2234 E. 71st St., famous for its potato chocolate-chip cookie.

He immediately respected Lindsey, now 67, for being “very straightforward.” Rather than taking advantage of his sweet tooth, she would look out for his health and call him out for overly ambitious ordering.

“‘Hey, that’s too much. You don’t need to eat all of that, honey,’” he recalled her saying.

Lindsey wanted him to enjoy within reason, perhaps a subconscious motherly instinct. She’d given her only son up for adoption and forgone any contact after giving birth to him at 17.

“I didn’t really have too much of a first impression of him,” she said, chuckling. “I really liked his girlfriend. He was just kind of the boyfriend who was around. As far as I was concerned, I was kinda like ‘She could do better’.”

After several years, Hunter’s regular bakery visits dwindled. He and his fiancee broke up, the pandemic paused indoor dining, and health problems made it difficult for Lindsey to keep the bakery open more than three days a week.

They didn’t reconnect until winter 2022 — this time as mother and son.

Estranged from his adoptive mother and intrigued by new genetic testing, Hunter had set out to find his birth mother.

“Disbelief,” Hunter said when asked how he felt upon learning his mother was his neighborhood baker. “You mean my mother is this outstanding figure in the community, owning a business?”

For Lindsey, it was healing.

“It allowed me to release a lot of things. I had suppressed a lot of emotions probably from the time he was born,” she said.

Her family encouraged her to forget and move on from what they saw as a taboo and shameful nine months for a teenager. She was never allowed to fully reconcile her pregnancy until Hunter connected with her 49 years later as she was preparing to undergo chemotherapy for breast cancer.

“Our spirits just kind of connected. It was automatic,” Lindsey said, recalling their first phone call.

Hunter, who said he now feels “complete,” offered to help her keep the bakery open through her health struggles.

It started slowly. He would come at night and Lindsey would give Hunter, a former logistics and supply chain account manager, one thing to do. Little by little he learned. Then, in April, he quit his job and began running the bakery full time.

If it wasn’t for him, the bakery likely would have been shut down.

“The biggest reason I wanted to close the bakery was because there was nobody to take it over that was going to treat it like I treat it or saw it the way I saw it, but he sees it,” Lindsey said.

Now, in a way, she’s making up for lost time, teaching her son how to bake the recipes handed down by her mother.

Lindsey admits that his cakes are already better than hers ever were, but she said he has some work to do on his sweet potato pie.

She plans to be in the kitchen with him every day this month as he navigates his first holiday season as a baker. Amid the craziness, they’ll also sit down for Thanksgiving dinner together.

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.