After a lifetime feeling like she didn’t fit in with her family, Arlene Lush has finally got some answers…
During a phone call with her mother on 18 January this year, Arlene Lush’s life changed forever. In a brief conversation, the woman who’d raised Arlene told her that she’d finally found her “real” daughter – and Arlene wasn’t her child.
“I literally fell to the floor,” says Arlene. “It felt like the world had been ripped out from underneath me.”
Growing up, Arlene, 53, had always felt different to her siblings, both in looks and personality.
At 11, Arlene’s mother, Ruth, told her she believed there was a mix-up in the hospital when she was born and Arlene wasn’t hers. She was sure the nurse had handed her the wrong baby the day after her daughter’s birth, but the nurse had insisted Arlene was her newborn.
Ruth wanted Arlene and Arlene’s father, Wilfred, to have their blood types tested to see if they matched.
Wilfred insisted Arlene was his daughter, refusing to have the test and Arlene was left reeling.
“I was desperately hurt,” she recalls, “I couldn’t understand why my mum accepted my siblings but not me.”
In her teenage years Arlene rebelled, dropping out of high school and getting pregnant at 17.
STRAINED
“I was a badass kid,” she says, “At 18, Mum kicked me out and I agreed to let her and Dad raise my baby son.”
re lationship with her family Arlene married at 26, but her remained strained.
When Arlene was in her thirties, her mother again asked her to take a DNA test.
She says, “Again I refused. It never occurred to me she could be right.”
Then, earlier this year, things changed.
Another Canadian woman called Caroline Weir Green, who’d been born on the same day as Arlene in September 1969 – in the same rural “Cottage Hospital” in Newfoundland – had grown up feeling different from her siblings.
Out of respect to the man she’d been told was her father, Hubert, Caroline had never explored her suspicion that he might not be her real dad.
But after Hubert’s death, Caroline’s husband bought her an Ancestry DNA test – and to her surprise she found a full sibling match to one of Arlene’s sisters.
That was when Arlene’s mother phoned her.
She says, “After the news sunk in I asked mum if I had biological parents out there. She replied saying if my parents were the couple everyone now thought they were, they were both dead.”
A telephone conversation with Caroline revealed that Arlene was the youngest of nine siblings. Her biological mum, Jessie had died in 2008 and the man they
