https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/family-parenting/article-15310955/The-heartbreaking-discovery-mother-gave-adoption-kept-older-sister-55-years-met-came-devastating-realisation.html?offset=9&max=100&jumpTo=comment-6552734163&reply=655273416The heartbreaking discovery my mother gave me up for adoption but kept my older sister. Then after 55 years I met he and came to a devastating realisation
By CAROL ANN MORISON
Published: 00:51, 21 November 2025 | Updated: 00:51, 21 November 2025
Growing up an only child, I never lacked for anything material or emotional. There’s a snap of me as a little girl with my parents that illustrates this perfectly. Always at the centre of their lives, I’m walking between them beautifully turned out, down to my neat white ankle socks and a bow in my hair with Mum and Dad each holding one of my hands. But there was one thing I desperately wanted that they couldn’t give me: brothers and sisters to play with. I loved going next door to see my best friend, Isobel, and her two sisters. I felt so envious watching how they shared toys and secrets. But I’d been adopted as a baby after my parents suffered the heartache of repeated miscarriages. Mum and Dad never kept my adoption a secret in fact, they told me it made me more precious to them but inevitably I wondered about my origins. An imaginative child, I fantasised that I was a stolen baby princess who would one day be returned to her royal family. It helped push out the very difficult question that lurked in the back of my mind: why hadn’t my birth mother loved me enough to keep me?
As I would discover later in life, there was a much more complicated answer to that question than I could ever have dreamt up as a little girl. For while my birth mother had desperately wanted to keep me, I was the only one of her five children who was put up for adoption. And I was not, as you might expect, her first-born. In fact, my older sister had stayed within the family. Discovering that I was the one given away was, at first, difficult to come to terms with. Of course, growing up I knew nothing of this. Until my teens I shied away from asking too many questions because I was worried my parents might feel rejected. But when I was 13, Dad died suddenly from a brain aneurysm and Mum moved us from our home in Stornoway, Scotland, back to her hometown of Hull. Unsettled by all the changes, the question ‘why did my birth mother give me away?’ began to intrude into my thoughts more frequently.
When I finally put this to Mum, far from being upset, she told me she always knew I’d ask and explained that my biological mother’s name was Helen, that she had become pregnant with me as a teenager and my birth father had wanted to marry her but her parents thought she was too young. I remember feeling a great sense of relief my mother hadn’t rejected me after all. I imagined my birth parents as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet: young lovers torn apart and cruelly forced to give up their baby. For the next two decades that explanation was enough for me. The question of where I came from sat quietly in the background while everyday life took over. Having left school at 17, I met my husband, Glenn, and we married when I was just 18 and he was 22. Our daughters, Tina and Amanda, were born in 1973 and 1974 respectively, and all my energy and focus went into bringing them up. It was only in 1989 when, aged 35, I happened to see a television documentary about two sisters separated at birth and reunited later in life, that those feelings came rushing back. I remember being in tears on the sofa, thinking how I’d longed for siblings of my own. After the documentary, I wrote to the register office in Edinburgh asking for a copy of my original birth certificate. As I was born in Glasgow it would be held there. They replied asking for documents I didn’t have: namely proof of identity beyond my adoption certificate. By then Mum had died she passed away in 1986 after suffering a stroke and the house had been cleared. Although I could have sent my marriage certificate, at the time it all just felt too overwhelming and so I pushed the idea of trying to trace Helen aside. It kept niggling at me, though. When I took a trip to Edinburgh the following year, I decided to try again. I gathered everything I could think of marriage certificate, photographs, any scraps of paperwork I still had. But on the drive up, my car was hit from behind and I ended up being taken home by the AA. I remember thinking the universe was telling me that meeting my birth mother just wasn’t meant to be. Looking back, that makes me very sad, because it turned out Helen longed to meet me and two years after the crash had tried to find me herself. Yet for me, life took over again. As well as caring for my family I was building a successful career in human resources, eventually becoming an international head of HR for a multi-national.
Then in 2008 by then aged 54 I was in Edinburgh for a meeting and happened to walk past Register House. It brought all the old feelings back. I finally went inside and the staff told me about Birthlink, the Scottish charity that helps reunite families following adoption. I sent them an email and a week later they told me they’d found a match mu mother had already contacted the charity herself. I felt a rush of elation so strong it left me dizzy. I imagined our reunion: what she would look like; what she would say; whether she would recognise anything of herself in me. So when, a few days later, a second email informed me she had died of cancer ten years earlier, aged 61, I felt utterly shattered. I read the message through a wall of tears. I had left it too late. But Birthlink forwarded me copies of the letters Helen had written during her attempts to find me. Seeing Mum’s handwriting beautifully neat, unlike my own left-handed scrawl felt incredible. Written on very thin-lined paper, they’re the most tangible thing connecting us and I still treasure them. They were addressed to the agency staff but so much of what she wrote seemed to have been intended for me. Little details stood out. She wrote that I had a birthmark on the back of my right calf something she had remembered from the time she spent with me in the mother-and-baby home before I was placed with my adoptive parents aged three months. And she wrote of her regret at not having been strong enough to stand up to her mother; that she had wanted to keep me but felt she had no choice. One line read: ‘I do not want my daughter to go through life thinking she was an unwanted child.’
Another said: ‘I will never forget her as long as I live.’
For a girl who had grown up assuming her birth mother didn’t want her, reading these words was extraordinarily emotional. Birthlink asked if I would like them to trace any other relatives. I didn’t hesitate to answer ‘yes’.
A few weeks later they contacted me to explain that Helen’s sister, Violet, was living in Glasgow and keen to speak to me. From the moment Violet picked up the phone, I felt a warmth that caught me off-guard as though she instinctively understood how overwhelming it was for me to speak to my first biological relative. She filled in the gaps, explaining how the family had emigrated to Australia under the Ten Pound Poms scheme after the war. But Helen falling pregnant with me aged 19 had caused such upset that the whole family had moved back to Glasgow in an attempt to keep her away from my father. Violet told me how, after I was adopted in 1954, Helen later married a man called Samuel and had three more children before the whole family moved back to Australia in the early 1970s. This was the first I knew of any siblings. I was delighted but also a little sad that they had got to grow up with our mother while I hadn’t. In that same conversation, Violet told me that Helen had made several trips back to Glasgow to try to find me. On one occasion she had tearfully told Violet: ‘She would have been 40 today.’
Then the conversation took a totally unexpected turn. Violet paused: ‘Helen had a baby before you.’
I didn’t breathe for a moment. ‘She had a little girl,’ she continued. ‘Her name was Ann.’
Everything in me seemed to stop. For 40 years I had believed I was Helen’s first child. In fact, I had built entire explanations of how my life started around that belief. The idea of another baby before me upended everything. I was too shocked to ask any questions and ended the conversation as quickly as I could so I could try to process what I had just learnt. Horrible thoughts swirled around my head. I assumed from the little Violet had said that Helen must have kept Ann, so why didn’t she keep me?
What sort of person had my mother really been?
Had I been too forgiving of her?
Three days later, my half-brother Billy, now 69, called. His voice felt instantly familiar. My other half-siblings Tommy, 65, and Linda, 67 were with him, and together they told me more about the mother I had never known. They recalled Helen working long hours in factories and as a bus conductor to support them; how she and their father Samuel had enjoyed a happy marriage; how gentle and loving she had been. But one question sat heavily on my tongue. Taking a breath, I asked: ‘Billy, are you in touch with Ann?’
There was a pause. He seemed shocked that I knew about her. Then he continued and my world shifted again. ‘You’re full sisters,’ he told me.
Ann and I shared the same father. He said that Ann, 15 months older than me, was also living in Australia. A few hours after we hung up, Ann phoned me herself. We talked for almost three hours that first night, the conversation intense and emotional. By the time we finished the call, everything I had feared since Violet’s revelation that I had an older sister had dissolved into something far more complex. It became clear, very quickly, that I had no need to be jealous of Ann’s relationship with our mother Helen. Ann’s childhood had been nothing like mine and in so many ways, I had been the lucky one. She told me that, yes, as I suspected, she had been kept in the family but she wasn’t raised by Helen. Instead, she was brought up by our grandparents, who told Ann that they were her parents. Apparently the arrangement had been presented to Helen as the only way she could stay connected to her baby but it was on the strict condition that Helen played the role of big sister and the secret was kept for ever. She had been a frightened teenager just 18 at the time and completely under her mother’s control, with no power to challenge any of it. When Helen subsequently became pregnant with me, our grandmother made it clear that another baby could not be absorbed into the household and that adoption was the only option. Ann herself only discovered the truth aged 21, when Helen finally told her. My sister’s early years sounded heartbreakingly bleak. Ann said our grandmother was cold and controlling, and she never felt wanted in that house. In a twist that still makes my stomach turn, she explained how our grandmother had another baby a few years after I was born, naming her Caroline. Technically my aunt, I’ve never met Caroline, as my siblings lost touch with her years ago. Ann told me that Helen and Violet felt sure our grandmother chose the name deliberately because it echoed Carol Ann my birth name, which my adoptive parents had kept. They believed, and I do too, that it was her way of punishing Helen for becoming pregnant with me. It wasn’t Caroline’s fault but she grew up the favoured younger child, with new clothes and affection, while Ann got the hand-me-downs. ‘I always knew something wasn’t right,’ she told me. ‘I always felt different.’
As Ann spoke, the contrast between our lives felt so stark. I had been adopted into a loving home where I was always made to feel wanted. My sister had stayed with our birth family but she had grown up always feeling out of place. Yet when Ann talked about our mother Helen, her voice softened. She told me about the little gifts Helen used to bring her, how she’d always felt more at ease with Helen than with our grandmother the woman she had believed was her mother. As for my birth father, Ann told me that she had met him but didn’t like him, so didn’t pursue any further relationship with him. I’ve no idea if he’s still alive but I never felt any longing to know him myself. Ann’s assessment was a good enough reason not to pursue it further. A year later, in 2009, I flew to Australia to meet all four of my siblings in person. I will never forget walking through the arrivals gate and seeing Ann. We hugged and then she stepped back and announced: ‘I can see Mum in you.’
For a second, I couldn’t speak. All my life I’d wondered who I took after, where my features came from. Hearing that felt like being handed a missing piece of myself. Meeting my younger half-siblings Billy, Tommy and Linda felt just as grounding. They were so welcoming and immediately protective of me in a way I never expected. When my husband Glenn died of cancer in 2015 my brothers and sisters supported me from the other side of the world. Ann even came over for the funeral. What strikes me most now is that the sadness I carry isn’t for what I missed out on not being with my birth mother. After all, I had a happy childhood and two wonderful parents. What hurts is thinking about what Helen missed out on. She never got to see me safe. She never saw me become a mother and now a grandmother. She never knew Glenn, or my girls her granddaughters. I think she would have been proud of the career I forged for myself. She would have loved knowing I was happy. I often think of her looking for me, travelling back to Glasgow and coming home in tears when she found nothing. The tragedy isn’t that I lost her it’s that she lost both her eldest girls, in different ways. Two daughters she wanted but wasn’t allowed to keep. At least now, we have found each other.
Babies Come From Glasgow, by Carol Ann Morison, (Grosvenor House Publishing, £15.99) is out now.
As told to RACHEL HALLIWELL
