New beginnings
Last year, author Lesley Pearse wrote in w&h about tracking down her mother’s family. Now that moment has led to another wonderful reunion
Imagine looking into an aquarium of tropical fish, the only distraction in a small waiting room. I’m holding Warren, my four-month-old baby, and I know that any minute someone is coming to take him and give him to his new adoptive parents.
He holds out one chubby hand towards the colourful fish and smiles. Five minutes later, he’s no longer in my arms and that is my last memory of my baby boy – a memory that must last a lifetime.
As an unmarried mother with no help from family or Warren’s father, no flat, no job and no nursery place, I had no choice but to give him up. Despite everything I’d tried to keep him, adoption was the best thing for my son.
As I shared with readers in 2020, I never got over that loss, not even with three other children later, wonderful grandchildren and eventually becoming a successful novelist. I had an internal wound that nothing could heal. Until last year.
Breaking away
Regular readers may remember that last August I wrote about tracking down my long-lost family. To recap for those who don’t know the story, my Irish mother died when I was three, and I had no contact with her family until 1962, when I was 17 and visited them in Roscommon. But when I became pregnant with Warren 18 months later by a man in England, I was sure that as Catholics they would see an illegitimate child as a grievous sin. Ashamed, I hid away from them – and from my father and stepmother. In 1965 my name was changed by marriage and I moved many times, eventually divorcing, marrying again and settling down in Bristol.
Shock discovery
About four years ago, I did a radio interview where I spoke about my mother’s relatives, and a cousin in Roscommon heard me. At Easter 2022, I was invited to a big family party where I was reunited with many of my relatives. It was wonderful – but what I never expected was that it would also lead to me finding my long-lost son.
The day after the party, my second cousin John Glynn revealed that he’d been contacted by the son I had given up all those years ago.
Warren, now called Martin, had moved to Texas and become a marine engineer. He had taken a DNA test and it had pinged John a few weeks earlier. All Martin had known of me growing up was that I was once called Lesley Sargent and that my mother was Irish. John had told Martin he was travelling to Ireland and he’d ask the family about me – and at this party, he had put two and two together.
I was speechless as John’s wife Joanne told me the news, my eyes wide. She pulled out some photos Martin had sent of himself as a child and now, a grown man of 58. My heart was pounding with joy, tears rollin
