Adopted child reunion: Sheila’s story
Sheila Walker traced her son John rather than the other way around. She was told by her intermediary in the week he was found, first that he wouldn’t meet her because he didn’t want to upset his Mum and then that he would, within days, but he wouldn’t write first or talk on the phone
In the end she met John at Waterloo station. She knew who to look out for because his adoptive mother had sent a photograph with a letter which started: “When we got the dreadful news that you were looking for him…” and ended: “I just want to say that everybody in the family really loves him and he’s very highly regarded and I hope you will like him too.”
She is, Sheila says, a remarkable woman and they are now close friends.
“That day at the station I walked up to this person and I felt very nervous,” Sheila tells me. She had endured years of anxiety and depression before she decided to look for John, which is hard to believe when you meet her now, a jolly, loquacious woman with a fat spaniel snoring on her lap.
“I didn’t like to look in his face but I said, ‘Excuse me, is your name John?’ and he just stared at me and the next thing I knew he had his arms around me, I was engulfed in his jacket. We didn’t speak, we just had our arms around each other and we were walking out and I said, ‘I don’t believe this is happening to me’. He said, ‘No, nor me’. It was like a fog.”
John, who is single and still lives with his adoptive parents, has come to see her most weekends for the past 13 years. “I’ve had the bit of his life that would normally be for a wife,” she says.
They go on holiday together each year; they’ve done the London-to-Brighton bicycle race together with her other son (who, like her daughter, gets on well with John but doesn’t see him as a brother); they recently built a garden shed together; when we met they’d just been to a fireworks display.
“We’re still catching up on the things we missed out on, over the years I’ve tried to bring the baby and the man together,” Sheila says. The first time she met John’s adoptive mother – let’s call her Barbara – they were on their own. “She’d brought loads of photos, including some I’d handed over with him, and she said ‘Here, take what you want’. She held my hand and I sobbed.”
Sheila, who is still acutely aware when they’re all together that “he’s Barbara’s son, not mine”, had not expected friendship but she says they are now as close as sisters. The two families have spent Christmas together for the past six years. “I think we’ve made sense of a complex situation,” she says. “It’s been very therapeutic; I feel at peace.” Written by Serena Allott
This article was created: 14 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 24 January 2007.
 Email  Back to top
|
