Meeting My Birth Father.

So yesterday I met my birth father. I have never been so nervous about anything in my life. Walking into the hotel where we were due to be meeting felt like the scariest thing ever.

I did it though and yes he did turn up. Which was a good start. I have to admit that for the first 5-10 minutes I reverted back to childhood and clammed up and went all shy and I just wanted to hide behind my adoptive parents.

After a while though I settled into it and it got less weird, we chatted about everyday things really and I showed him some pictures of myself growing up.

The heartbreaking part was when we got talking about the events surrounding my adoption. I knew the story pretty well, but it was interesting hearing it from his point of view. I found out just how few rights he had when it came to my adoption. He didn't want me to be given up but had no choice, in fact my mother's husband had more rights than him! He never saw me because he couldn't face saying goodbye and he has waited 18yrs to finally see me. We also found out that whilst my adoptive parents were asked to write a letter documenting my growing up for my birth parents until i was 5, these were never collected because he had no idea that this was available for him, he was quite upset about this understandably and it seems that the system failed here as we could have been in contact many years before. But that's said and done and there's nothing we can do about that now.

I'm so glad I've met him and we have swapped details so we can keep in contact and hopefully he can be part of my life now, he doesn't live too far from me so it shouldn't be too hard.

Now I just have to see if things go as well when it comes to contacting my birth mother.