Woman Reunites With Birth Mother 53 Years After She Was Given Up For Adoption

Adopted as a baby and unable to trace her birth mother, Vicki Haskell, 53, who is yet to have her own baby, had longed to find her family her whole life, especially after she went through menopause. Her fondest wish came true she was reunited with her mum through a reunion TV Show, Long Lost Family.

‘It was incredibly hard. It brought home to me that I had no bloodline at all – nothing behind me and nothing going forward,’ she says.

All throughout her life, she had a stock response whenever people asked about her family.

‘I would say I had a lovely upbringing with adoptive parents, but that I couldn’t trace my mother. I would pretend it was OK, that it wasn’t a big deal. But really I was just trying to convince myself,’ she recalls.

Because the truth was that Vicki had endured a sense of rootlessness and longing for a blood tie that were felt even more keenly when she went through menopause.

‘Finding her was never about replacing anything but enriching my life, and from the moment I met Mum for the first time there was this sense of coming home. Since then I have felt so much more comfortable in my skin, and been to make sense of who I am because I knew where and who I came from,’ she said.

Vicki’s story is a testament to the enduring need felt by many adopted children to trace their roots, even though she grew up in a loving and happy middle-class family.

Raised in Abingdon by Ron, a research scientist and Eileen, a teacher who chose to stay at home after she had children, her adoptive parents also had a biological son, David, 51, to whom Vicki remains close to this day.

‘My (adoptive) mother had decided to adopt after several miscarriages, but they then went on to have a baby,’ she reveals.

Vicki knew she was adopted from as early as she can remember.

Fair-haired and blue-eyed, she bore no resemblance to her dark-haired, dark-eyed parents, who made a point of talking openly about how they had brought her into the family.

She admits: ‘There was no great announcement, it was just never a secret.’

Although her adoptive parents were loving and supportive, as she hit her teens, Vicki recalls a growing sense of displacement.

‘They were affectionate, but they didn’t go in for grand displays of emotions. I became convinced that they weren’t treating me the same as my brother because I wasn’t really theirs. I never openly said that to them, and deep down I think I knew I was being unreasonable, but I felt that very strongly.’

Meanwhile her attempts to elicit information about her birth mother were endlessly frustrated.

Then, around the age of 14, Vicki found some paperwork hidden in Ron’s desk. Alongside, it was a letter from a church minister to her adoptive parents giving them some background information about her birth mother. These details later helped her find her birth mother several years later in Johannesburg, South Africa.

She learned her mum become pregnant with her via a holiday romance, but despite being in her 20s there was no question of her keeping a baby out of wedlock in the ultra-conservative South Africa of the Sixties, where she still lived with her strict, Victorian parents.

‘She felt she had nothing to offer and having lived in the UK for a while she felt it would be a better place for me to grow up. She had had to promise her parents that she would never try and find me but she had taken great consolation from the fact that I had been taken on by people who had cherished me,’ Vicki said.

Vicki’s voice trembled with emotion as she recalls the first moment she set eyes on the woman she had thought about almost constantly for 50 years.

Now back in the UK after the reunion in Johannesburg, Vicki exchanges daily emails and weekly Skype calls with her mum, and is already set to return to South Africa in September for her 80th birthday celebrations.

She hopes to find her dad too someday but is currently dedicated to getting to know her mum, newly found step brother, and mum’s extended family.

Source: DailyMail