Adopted child reunion: Janet’s story
In 1962, six weeks after 18-year-old Janet gave birth to the son she called Stephen, the people who were to be his parents came to take him away She said goodbye to her precious baby in the sluice room, the only private place she could find in the mother and baby home where she had spent the last shameful weeks of her pregnancy. “Then I had to give him to the matron. There was me in one room losing him and they were in another room getting him. I wasn’t allowed to meet them but I did see him go. Janet was told to get on with her life and, except for the man she later married, she never spoke of Stephen to anyone again. Thirty-seven years later, out of the blue, Janet had a letter from the social services saying that the son she had given up for adoption wanted to meet her; did she want to meet him? “I rang the social worker and she said she’d met him, he’d been in her office. I was so jealous. I wanted her to tell me as much as she could about him. I was so excited, I couldn’t believe it.” The connection with the baby she gave away is always with Janet Weaver, a tall, dignified woman almost visibly scarred by anger and grief. She met Stephen in the bar of a hotel midway between their homes. When she introduced herself, he kissed her on the cheek and bought her a drink. She then showed him his birth certificate and the one photo she had of him. “We probably chatted for a couple of hours. I’d taken my camera but I didn’t like to ask him for a photograph and I think he felt the same, so we went away without one. When we said goodbye I was as high as if I was on a drug, not that I’ve ever been on drugs. I felt totally euphoric.” After saying goodbye to her new-found son, Janet went home and wept. “I sank right down to rock bottom,” she says. “Because it was so locked up it wasn’t until the reunion that it hit me. Afterwards I still felt I’d lost my baby but I realised I’d lost everything about him. I didn’t see him toddle or grow up. It’s worse than a death, really. I hated my parents, I hated everybody, but who could I be angry with? She hopes her misery did not have too profound an effect on her other children, a daughter and son in their thirties. When they learnt about Stephen, some years before he made contact, they had been unfazed. And they had left home anyway. In “the honeymoon period” that follows most reunions, Janet met Stephen’s adoptive mother, the three children and their partners met each other and then Janet invited Stephen and his adoptive family round for Sunday lunch. All went well and Janet dreamt of the two families uniting, but Stephen hasn’t been to her house again. She sees him about three times a year, they walk the dog, they occasionally talk on the phone, and she has met his young daughter: “I’m Janet to her,” she says sadly. She admits the truth: “He wanted to look into his background, what had happened, where he’d come from. I don’t think he anticipated us having a relationship.” Since meeting Stephen, Janet has been back to the site of the mother and baby home where they spent six weeks together. It is now a block of offices. “I planted a rose in the garden and I brought an identical one home and planted it in my garden. That was my way of saying goodbye.” She says she doesn’t know whether she is glad her reunion happened. “The wound is still too raw at the moment. In one way it’s good not to have such a huge secret in my life any more, but I still feel ashamed that I had sex before marriage.” Written by Serena Allott
This article was created: 14 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 24 January 2007.
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