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(Read: 'Oprah Winfrey: Big Reveal is Long-Lost Sister.')
On the emotional episode, that the 56-year-old host called "one of the greatest surprises" of her life, Winfrey introduced the world to her younger sister Patricia.
The story goes that Patricia was given up for adoption by Winfrey's mother, Vernita Lee, at birth. Winfrey, who was 9 years old at the time, was living with other relatives and never knew her mom was pregnant.
Patricia went into the foster care system and was eventually adopted. She describes her childhood as "difficult" and decided to search for her biological family at the urging of her two children, Andre and Aquarius.
Patricia got a package from the state of Wisconsin with information on her biological family, but was told that her birth mother did not want to meet her. Patricia them saw Lee in an interview on the local news, and the information Lee shared about her deceased children was eerily similar to the results Patricia found in the family package.
In 2007, Patricia came to the realization that Lee was definitely her mother and Winfrey was her half-sister. She kept the discovery quiet while she made num
erous attempts to meet her biological family."Since I have been a person known in the public, there have been few times that I have been anywhere and not been sold out. There have been few times that you can bring anybody into your life and not have that person in some way betray you or use you or take advantage of you. What is so extraordinary about Patricia and Andre and Aquarius is that they have known this secret since 2007. She had tried and tried again to get responses from my mother and other people in the family and she never once thought to go to the press," a tearful Winfrey said.
Winfrey's two other siblings - a brother Jeffrey and a sister also named Patricia - are both deceased. She admitted that learning of the second Patricia left her "speechless."
"For the most part, my life has been an open book and on the show I think I've seen about everything, and I thought nothing could surprise me anymore, but let me tell you I was wrong," she explained.
During an untelevised post-show discussion with her audience, the Kosciusko, Miss.-bred media mogul confessed that she and Patricia have not had a lot of time to get acquainted because shortly after their initial meeting on Thanksgiving, Winfrey left to shoot her show in Australia.
"I am a strong believer at meeting people where there are, not in what you wish could happen," she said. "I don't feel like I've been reunited with a long lost sister, because I didn't know I had one. It's about building a relationship, woman to woman, out of respect -- mutual respect. First you start with friendship and then you grow to love somebody. I already love her for her character and already respect her for the person that she's shown herself to be. Relationships are about building something and not about what you have in your head. That's what I have learned from all of the people who've been on the show in past years."
The Emmy-winning talk show host confessed that discussing the family matter on camera with her mother was one of the greatest challenges of her career.
"That little interview that I did, it was one of the toughest things I've ever done! Trying to get my own mother to talk
about this was very freeing for me. I understood a lot of things just in that little time," she revealed.And though Winfrey recognizes that her mom's response to Patricia isn't the reaction akin to most TV family reunions, she understands that her mother's shame hasn't allowed her to become free of the guilt of abandoning her child in 1963.
"When I left my mother, I was thinking about my whole interview and why she was so shut down and so closed with Patricia. There's Patricia, you can feel her yearning for her mother -- our mother -- to say something. You can see her yearning for that and Vernita not giving it to her. Then I realized she can't! She can't give it to her because she has not been freed of the shame. Maybe this will do this for our mother, and maybe not. It'll take a while," she expressed.
Winfrey concluded: "My relationship with Patricia has nothing to do with how my mother chooses to react or doesn't choose to react. My mother is pretty shut down in many ways. Part of the reason she is probably shut down is because she's carried this secret and who knows how many others she's carried! But that shouldn't affect the way I behave with her or behave with Patricia and the rest of the family."
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