When my husband died in June, 2012, I rang the daughter I had to relinquish in 1966, to tell her that her birth father had passed. Straight away she started saying, “Why did you adopt me out? Why did you have two more children and keep them?”

I had told her my story many times in the twenty years we had been reunited, but I had not told her every detail. It was embarrassing to say ‘Your father was a criminal. We were on the run.’

Now I can look back and see the hurt and feeling of abandonment in her words, but on that night, with my beloved husband only dead these past two hours, I became exasperated with her not understanding how hard my life had been when she was born. I said to her, “I have told you a hundred times what happened but now that your birth father is dead, I will write a book and I will tell the whole story, warts and all.”

It was painful rehashing my life, but my pain from losing my husband was dreadful, so the pain from dredging up my past could not make me feel worse. I wrote during the dark, sleepless hours and then when the sky turned to grey, just before dawn, I would finally sleep.

When I started writing the chapter where I was reunited with the beautiful grown woman, who I had no right to call my daughter, it brought up such grief of the remembrance of ‘losing my baby’ that I stopped writing for a year. You see when I was reunited with her, I suddenly had this tremendous longing to have my baby back. I wanted my baby that I had carried in my womb for over nine months. I wanted to smell my baby’s head for that special baby smell, bathe her, clothe her and feed her. I knew I could never have that and the grief I had tried to keep hidden for years, suddenly erupted from me and permeated my every living moment. Even in my sleep I cried.

After I had written the book I had a new perspective of how my daughter felt. I realised she felt abandoned. Although in my mind I did not ever think I had abandoned her, technically I did. Walking out of the hospital and leaving her there meant I had abandoned her.

It was healing to tell my story, although I have always been a very private person, I now realise that repressing my emotions, and my pain is unhealthy. Physical health problems can be caused by emotional problems.

With the writing of my story, I lovingly release the past. All is well. Life is good.