Meeting Haze

Well, it's now three weeks since I finally met my sister. It has been a rollercoaster of an experience - so many highs and laughter together with tears.

The photo here is me and Haze at the airport 5 minutes after meeting for the first time.

On the Wednesday before I met her the enormity of the event - meeting her for the first time in 40 years was starting to set in.

I wrote:

"I first started to seriously think about the possibility of meeting Haze over five years ago, when a brush with breast cancer brought my mortality into sharp relief. The shock of possible death, together with the knowledge that it could be hereditary was an impetus to find out about my early years in care and start to find Haze. The search was difficult and made less easy by the fact that our mother had no desire to meet Haze. Our mother had given Haze for adoption in 1966 and had kept me – the toddler from a previous relationship.

I have always struggled with why this was. Why on earth did my mum keep me – the mixed race child and give away the white baby from a more recent relationship? I am still waiting for a credible answer. She has recently begun to try and explain. I think I understand some of why it might be difficult. She was clearly very afraid of loosing me and more so of loosing both of us. I think in her mind giving one child up meant that she would at least hang onto the other.

Immediately after Haze and I were reunited (by email and phone through a NORCAP intermediary) we made plans to meet. The plan was for me to fly out to Australia and stay with her in Brisbane. I even managed to line up some work while I was out there. Everything was going so well. Haze and I were getting on famously – the same laugh and sense of humour, similar likes and dislikes, we had even followed each other around London during our teenage years. We couldn’t believe that we had probably passed each other on the street and had no idea at all! Photographs showed very little physical similarities – we had both clearly taken after our fathers, but this did not seem to matter at all.

With plane tickets and visa arrangements sorted, I discovered another lump and very shortly had it confirmed as a recurrence of the breast cancer from five years previously. All our plans had to be put on hold and we continued to keep regular contact via email and phone throughout my treatment. It means that there has been a delay of almost a year from our initial plans to meet. In that time, my Nanna died and has left a huge gap in my life. She was my touchstone, my rock, who was always there for me through good, bad and plain ordinary. I’m torn between enormous sadness that Haze will never get to meet her and huge joy that her mother Jenny did. They were going to write a book together – the story of two remarkable women who adopted the mother and child. It would have been a best seller!"

I have now met Haze, her son David, wife Hannah and baby Charlie together with Jenny and Bill and am amazed at how well everything has turned out. I will write more about our adventures.