There’s nothing like growing up with a best friend who feels like a brother or sister. Someone who you could fight with, laugh with, cry with and confide in, sometimes even better than you can with your own siblings.
Twelve-year-old Isaac Nolting and 13-year-old Dakotah Zimmer had that kind of friendship after just one day.
The two boys met at their community swimming pool in Washington, Missouri, and immediately became friends after horseplaying around with one another.
Aside from their natural love for all of the same things, the two boys shared an uncanny resemblance to each other. Some of their friends commented on how much they looked alike, talked alike, walked alike, and one even remarked that the two were “fighting like brothers.”
The boys’ curiosity was piqued.
Dakotah knew he had a brother who he’d never met, who had been adopted by a woman named Dawn.
“That’s my mom’s name,” Isaac said.
That launched a whole new investigation among the boys. For the first time in his life, Isaac was questioning if he had been adopted.
Dawn Nolting had been praying about when to tell Isaac that he was adopted, and hadn’t yet worked up the courage to do so. It seems God heard her prayers and crafted up something even more magical.
That night, Isaac sat on the edge of his mother’s bed and asked if they could talk.
“He looked at me with his big, black eyes and asked, ‘Mom, am I adopted?’” Dawn recalls “I said, ‘What makes you think that?’ And he said, ‘Because I think I found my brother.’”
Dawn told her son that he was in fact adopted, and the two burst into tears.
“I just cried and cried and cried,” Isaac told Today. “I was so happy that I had a brother. I always asked for one.”
The boys’ biological mother passed away in 2007, leaving Dakotah and his 10-year-old sister, Ashley, to live with their grandmother in Augusta, Missouri—just 12 miles away from Isaac.
The next time they hung out, the boys, who already shared an unbreakable bond, now spent time laughing and fighting as brothers—real, blood brothers. They shared stories about their years apart, and pictures of life growing up. Their grandmother even had photos of the two of them together as toddlers.
“You can just tell they’re brothers,” Dawn says. “It’s the strongest bond that I’ve ever seen. It’s like they were never separated. For being apart for 10 years and 20 minutes away, they picked up right where they left off.”
What began as a summer day at the pool turned into a family reunion more than a decade in the making.
