Meeting My Birth Father

So, my adoption story continues with the discovery that my birth mother had been in contact with my birth father all the time. She had been in touch with him over the years, meeting him often. She knew where he lived, about his married life, where he worked, all about his family, and was able to contact him for me to organise a meeting so that I could meet him too. Meeting my birth father wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

When I think about this, it seems disconcerting that their relationship continued over all those years, but talking to my birth father about it, he said that they had always had a spark between the two of them. It was just that my birth mother's family did not want him involved with their daughter at all. He said, "To them, he just wasn’t good enough." He had tried to marry her when she found out that she was pregnant with me, but at 16, her parents decided to have me adopted instead, with no consultation with either of my birth parents.

They took her away to give birth to me, and it wasn’t until she returned home after six weeks that my birth father found out I had been born and adopted out. He tried again to marry her and was refused and told to go away and leave her alone.

Back in the 1950s, that was not an unusual occurrence, but it must have been traumatising for them both.

My birth father instead married a beautiful lady and had four big strapping boys. His wife knew that he had a daughter somewhere, and it was often the topic of conversation with him about not having his little girl in their family.

My first meeting with my birth father was organised, and Mum, Dad, and I were invited to come to dinner to meet the family. It was one of the most uncomfortable dinners I have ever attended. We arrived and were all introduced to each other. Dad and my birth father worked out that they knew each other in a professional capacity, with them working for the same employer. What a coincidence!

We sat down to dinner, and my birth father stood up and told his boys that I was their half-sister. Well, you could have knocked them all over. They were in shock and couldn’t believe that their dad had a child out of wedlock. I then had four pairs of eyes staring at me for the rest of the night. I think the most put out of all of them was the oldest, who was very annoyed that he was no longer the eldest of the children in the family.

We had a lovely dinner and lots of conversations about me, my life, and my family. It was lovely to meet such an amazing family. Held together by my birth father’s awesome wife, they were tight-knit, loving, and, after their initial shock, very accepting of me.

Meeting my birth father’s family was a blessing. I now have this gorgeous extended family, and we have stayed close over the last 33 years that we have known each other. My birth father was a bit of a character, a bit naughty, and very lost when his wife passed away.

It was not the relationship I had with my dad at all. In fact, if I’m honest, he wasn’t what I thought of as a great role model either, but we were tied together by our DNA, and that was important to me. His stories about my adoption and subsequent contact with my birth mother varied from hers, and I tend to think he was speaking the truth. Sadly, he passed away four years ago. I had a lot of his mannerisms, and you could tell that he was my father because we looked alike. At his funeral, I reconnected with his wife’s family, his old friends, and his cousins, and they all remarked on how much they could see of him in me.

Meeting my birth father was an important link to my past, and I had a lot of questions answered while he was still alive. I’m very grateful that my Mum and Dad gave me a loving home and family to belong to and would never have wished for anything else.

Love, Nana Louise

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