For a parent, being separated from your children has to be the most unbearable thing. But for Lani, that was her life for the past 40 years.Lani, from Thailand, met a member of the U.S. Air Force while he was stationed there during the Vietnam War. She fell in love with him and soon the couple married and moved to Ohio. This couple had a daughter there and then moved to Oxford, England, and had another baby girl.

However, two years later, the relationship went south and the two divorced. Because Lani didn’t speak English well, she didn’t understand the terms of the divorce and signed away her rights to ever see her daughters again. And from that day onward, both mother and daughters spent the next 40 years searching for each other — until they were finally reunited, thanks to social media.

When Lani was separated from her daughters, Starla and Jeannie, the girls were only two and three years old. It was as hard on the girls as it was for their mom. “We asked our dad a lot about our mom, and he never spoke ill of our mom to us. He just said that she couldn’t speak English because she’s full-blooded Thai, and he said she thought since we were American and he was in the military, he could take better care of us and provide us a better life than she could.”, Starla tells ABC News.

So for the next four decades, both mother and daughters searched for each other. When Starla and Jeannie got a little older, they searched every database they could with the “help” of their dad — but to no avail. “When I sit back and I think of everything, I think he just tried to make it look like he helped. He was trying to protect us, or he was scared he was going to lose his baby girls.