The day Sue was due to meet her birth father for the first time could not have been more momentous. "I'd wanted to meet my original family for years. I needed to know who I was but, more than that, I hoped it would fill the massive hole I felt as a result of being placed in an adoptive family who didn't get me at all," says Sue, 40.
They arranged to meet at a railway station and she can still remember the butterflies in her stomach. "It felt a big deal for an 18-year-old girl to travel miles by train to meet someone I didn't know. Every 10 seconds or so, someone would walk past and I'd think, is it you?"
He never showed up. "After an hour and a half, I went to a phone box. His wife answered and she came to walk me back to their house, where he eventually turned up with some excuse about work. We hugged briefly and I remember tears, but mainly because I was so traumatised after he hadn't come. That anger and disappointment shaped our relationship. I was never quite able to get past it."
It's hard to imagine a worse start to an adoption reunion. But even highly charged Oprah-style reunions do not always end happily. Some fizzle out; others end abruptly in rows. Some never really take off at all. There is so much emotion invested, so it's little wonder that those involved are often left feeling bewildered and bruised.
"This is the unexpected side of reconnecting that we don't really hear about," says Julia Feast, of the British Association of Adoption and Fostering...........
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/dec/29/adoption-reunions-road-gets-bumpy
