Image sourceCourtesy of Diane Sheehan
It was a hot December night in 2018.
Diane Sheehan, a 63-year-old New Zealand veterinarian, arrived home in Brisbane, Australia, after having dinner with friends.
He was sitting on the couch when he received a notification that would change his life.
"I picked up my phone and there was an email from a young man telling me his date of birth and the hospital where he was born. He told me he had done some research and believed I was his mother," Sheehan tells the BBC's Outlook programme.
"My mind was completely clouded. I couldn't think about anything, I couldn't breathe...I felt like I was out of my body," he remembers.
Diane had had a baby in 1976, precisely on the date and in the hospital that the young man behind the email mentioned.
But his son had died.
At least, that's what she had been told at the Sydney hospital where she had given birth.
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So who was this person contacting her?
An unexpected pregnancy
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Diane was born in the 1950s in Wellington, New Zealand, into an ultra-Catholic family.
She received a conservative education in a school run by nuns.
"There was no formal sex education as such...They warned us about getting on the bus with the boys...They said if we sat in the same seat we would get pregnant," Diane recalls.
In that context, she says, it never occurred to her to use protection when she had her first sexual experiences with Rick, a young man she fell in love with while she was in Canada.
"Rick was really my first love. He was very attentive, kind. He shared my interest in horses. He was an extraordinary rider," she remembers.
Diane met him when she decided to leave her parents' house. She first tried her luck in Australia, but then found an opportunity in the North American country to work as a nanny in exchange for room and board. He worked on a nearby farm.
They had their first date at a McDonald's. "We ate a hamburger and some fries. I had never been to a place like that. He had confidence in himself and experience of the world. I just got carried away by the moment," he recalls.
Rick soon moved to California. Diane went to visit him, but missed her flight back to Canada and was fired on the spot from her job.
This meant that she no longer had the right to remain there and was forced to return to Australia.
At that point I was already pregnant, but I didn't know it yet.
"In denial"
Before the era of mobile phones and social media, both young people lost touch.
Diane then got a job on a horse farm in Sydney, run by a doctor and his wife.
The couple, he remembers, shared the same conservative Catholic ideas as their parents.
It would be months before Diane realized she was pregnant and others before she faced the situation.
"I couldn't recognize it. I couldn't say it out loud," he says.
"I was probably in a denial phase. I think it took me about six months (to accept it). I was afraid... Because I didn't know what was going to happen and, because of my upbringing, I was very aware of the shame and guilt associated with it, I guess," he adds.
Diane remembers that things were different back then.
"Those times were tremendously oppressive, controlling and full of prejudice. As a single mother, society judged you and practically ostracized you," she says.
With these fears, for months, Diane managed to hide her pregnancy.
On the farm, his baggy uniform and small size made it easy for him to hide his belly.
When the contractions came, she also tried to cope alone.
"Then I went up to the main house and my boss's wife was there. I think I was vomiting by then. She took me to the doctor's office he ran and examined me. And then I remember... I don't want to remember, but I can still see the look of shock on her face when she took out the fetal stethoscope and listened. Then we went to the hospital," he says.
"The baby died"
Diane says her experience at the hospital was a nightmare.
"Going through that alone was traumatic. Traumatic, to put it mildly. I remember that practically no one spoke to me. I know that, when they took the baby, my baby, they left me naked on a table. I was bleeding and I was very cold," she says.
When they took her baby away, they didn't even give her the chance to hold him in her arms, to see his face. They also did not tell her if she had had a boy or a girl. They did not allow him any contact.
Then they told him he had died.
It wasn't true. He would find out about this 42 years later with the email he read on his couch. His son - who has decided to remain anonymous - was alive and had been given up for adoption to another family.
Diane would later understand that she was one of tens of thousands of women who were victims of forced adoptions in Australia between the 1950s and 1970s.
The Catholic Church and other institutions in the country colluded to force single mothers to give their children up for adoption. The practices included psychological coercion, forced separation of mothers and children, and, in some cases, irregularities in adoption processes.
In 2013, the Australian government officially acknowledged the harm caused to thousands of families and apologized to the victims. "To you, the mothers who were betrayed by a system that gave you no choice and subjected you to manipulation, abuse and bad practices, we apologize," Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said on that occasion.
Five years later Diane would find out that she was one of those women.
The revelation reopened a wound he had struggled to bury. He never told anyone what happened in that Sydney hospital.
"There was no way I could tell my parents or my family what had happened. And then I thought, well, I could write to Rick. But what would I say? 'When I left I was pregnant, I had your baby, but she died?' I guess I tried to be pragmatic. What was the point? And I think I was probably pretty emotionally damaged by then," she reflects.
Nor did she bring up the subject with the husband she would meet years later, nor with the other two children she would have with him.
She took refuge in her work as a veterinarian and in her studies.
"That silence marked me in such a way that, if I had a job, I tried to have two or three, to go to bed at night completely exhausted. I didn't want to have to think. I wanted to keep myself as busy as possible," she says.
The revelation
Diane read not once, not twice, but several more times that email her son sent her in 2018.
He told her that he didn't want anything from her. I simply wanted to meet her and perhaps explore the possibility of having a connection.
He told her that he had had a happy life, that his adoptive parents gave him everything he needed.
"And then he said, 'By the way, just so you know, you're a grandmother.'"
He had attached a photo of his granddaughter. "Now we know where your curly hair comes from," he wrote.
Diane remembers that when she saw that photo she knew that the one on the other side had to be her son.
"I looked at that photo of my granddaughter. And right to my left were a bunch of bookshelves with books and photos on them. And there was one of mine from when I was her age, probably about 2 and a half or 3. It was like we were twins. My head was spinning," Diane says.
Then came the frantic investigation to get to the truth.
Diane spent hours investigating what could have happened in that Sydney hospital in 1976.
In that search she found an organization that specialized in advice and support in adoption cases in Brisbane.
She called them and the other side told her: "You're not the only one."
That day Diane began a personal journey that she describes as "very painful."
But also - he says - one with whom he was reunited with his son and his family.
Image sourceCourtesy of Diane Sheeh
The reunion
After receiving that news Diane was shaken. I felt like a tremendous wound was reopening.
He was afraid that this secret he kept for so long would destroy the life he had built. He didn't know how his children were going to react to this part of his history that had weighed on him for so many years.
But they took it well and supported her in everything that came.
Finally Diane decided to respond to the email and then travel to meet her firstborn.
"Initially he and his family were going to come see me, but then it all started to feel too overwhelming. I guess he was trying to control the situation. We decided that I would fly over to meet them," she recalls.
He took a flight to Sydney. When he got off the plane he saw him for the first time. "There he was, standing, with a little bouquet of white flowers."
"He gave me a huge hug and I just didn't want to let him go," he recalls.
Then they went to his house and he met his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren.
By now Diane already knew that her son's adoptive parents had also been deceived.
"They were told that his mother couldn't take care of him, that she wanted him to be adopted by a religious family, that she wanted him to be given a certain name, and that he wanted photographs sent to a certain address," she says.
He would later find out that his son's adoptive mother sent him letters for years.
"The first time I met them, I had flown to Sydney to attend my grandson's school concert. We were sitting there having something to eat before we went and all of a sudden she (her adoptive mother) leaned over to me, put her hand on mine and said, 'Thank you.' give us all this.' And he extended his arm pointing at them," he recalls.
Diane says that moment broke her: "My God, it took all my strength..."
"That is the contradiction you have to live with. He was conceived in a loving relationship. He was adopted, even with all the pain that I went through, and even more so now that I know the truth of what happened...But they raised my son and loved him, took care of him, did everything for him. They were wonderful people, of extraordinary kindness," he reflects.
Today Diane continues to cultivate her bond with her son and her entire family.
"I can't change anything that has happened. The people who were involved, the norms and the culture...But what I want to do is dedicate my energy to building a relationship with my son, whom I lost for 40 years," she says.
"Of course I've felt anger. And I've seen some people consumed by those emotions. But the joy of having my family together is something so overwhelmingly powerful...That's what I want to cultivate and enjoy now."
*This note is based on an episode of the BBC program Outlook. You can listen to it in English by clicking here.
*With production and writing by Isabel Caro.
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