Credit, Personal Collection/Diane Sheehan
It was a warm night in December 2018.
Diane Sheehan, a 63-year-old New Zealand veterinarian, arrived home in Brisbane, Australia, after dinner with friends.
She was sitting on the couch when she received a notification that would change her life.
"I picked up my phone and there was an email from a young man telling me his date of birth and the hospital where he was born. He said he had done a bit of research and believed I was his mother," Sheehan tells the BBC's Outlook radio program.
"My mind was completely confused. I couldn't think about anything, I couldn't breathe... I felt like I was outside my body", he recalls.
Diane had a baby in 1976, exactly on the date and in the hospital mentioned by the young man behind the email.
But his son had died.
At least, that's what she was told at the Sydney hospital where she gave birth.
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So who was this person contacting her?
An unexpected pregnancy
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Diane was born in the 1950s in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, into an ultra-Catholic family.
He received a conservative education at a school run by nuns.
"There was no formal sexual education... We were warned not to take the bus with the boys... They said that if we sat on the same bench we would get pregnant", recalls Diane.
In this context, she says, it never occurred to her to use protection when she had her first sexual experiences with Rick, a young man with whom she fell in love during her stay in Canada.
"Rick was really my first love. He was very attentive, kind. He shared my interest in horses. He was an extraordinary horseman", he recalls.
Diane met him when she decided to leave her parents' house. First, she tried her luck in Australia, but then found an opportunity in the North American country to work as a nanny in exchange for room and board. He worked on a nearby farm.
They had their first date at a McDonald's. "We ate a burger and fries. I had never been to a place like that. He had confidence in himself and life experience. I just let myself be carried away by the moment", he recalls.
Rick moved shortly afterwards to California, USA. Diane went to visit him, but missed her flight back to Canada and was immediately fired from her job.
This meant she no longer had the right to stay there and was forced to return to Australia.
At this point, she was already pregnant, but she didn't know it yet.
Credit, Diane Sheehan
'In denial'
In an era before cell phones and social media, the two young men lost touch.
Diane later found work on a horse farm in Sydney, run by a doctor and his wife.
The couple, she recalls, shared the same conservative Catholic ideas as her parents.
It would be months before Diane realized she was pregnant and many more before she faced the situation.
"I couldn't recognize it. I couldn't say it out loud," he says.
"I was probably in a denial phase. I think it took me about six months (to accept it). I was scared... Because I didn't know what was going to happen, and because of my upbringing, I was very aware of the shame and guilt associated with it, I suppose," he adds.
Diane remembers that things were different back then.
"Those times were tremendously oppressive, controlling and full of prejudice. As a single mother, society judged you and practically ostracized you," she says.
With these fears, Diane managed to hide her pregnancy for months.
On the farm, the loose uniform and her small physical size made it easy to hide her belly.
When the contractions started, she also tried to face them alone.
"Then I went up to the main house and there was my boss's wife. I think at that point I was already vomiting. She took me to the doctor's office that he managed and examined me. And then I remember... I don't want to remember, but I can still see the look of shock on her face when she picked up the fetal stethoscope and listened. Then we went to the hospital," he says.
'The baby died'
Diane says her experience at the hospital was a nightmare.
"Going through that alone was traumatic. Traumatic, to say the least. I remember that practically no one spoke to me. I know that when they took the baby, my baby, they left me naked on a table. I was bleeding and I felt very cold," she says.
When they took your baby, they didn't even give you the opportunity to hold him in your arms, to see his face. They also didn't tell her whether she had a boy or a girl. They did not allow any contact.
Then they said he had died.
It wasn't true. She would discover this 42 years later, through the email she read on her couch. Her son, who chose to remain anonymous, was alive and had been given up for adoption to another family.
Diane would later understand that she was one of tens of thousands of women who were victims of forced adoptions in Australia between the 1950s and 1970s.
The Catholic Church and other institutions in the country came together to force single mothers to give up their children for adoption. The practices included psychological coercion, forced separation of mothers and children and, in some cases, irregularities in adoption processes.
In 2013, the Australian government officially acknowledged the harm caused to thousands of families and apologized to the victims.
"To you, mothers who were betrayed by a system that gave you no options and subjected you to manipulation, mistreatment and inappropriate practices, we apologize," Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said at the time.
Five years later, Diane would discover she was one of those women.
The revelation reopened a wound she had worked hard to bury. He never told anyone what happened in that Sydney hospital.
"There was no way I could confess to my parents or my family what had happened. And then I thought, well, I could write to Rick. But what would I say? 'When I left I was pregnant, I had your baby, but he died?' I suppose I tried to be pragmatic. What sense would that make? And I think that probably, at that point, I was already quite emotionally shaken", he reflects.
She also never brought up the subject with her husband who she would meet years later, nor with the other two children she would have with him.
She took refuge in her work as a veterinarian and in her studies.
"This silence marked me in such a way that, if I had a job, I tried to have two or three, so that I could go to bed at night completely exhausted. I didn't want to have to think. I wanted to keep myself as busy as possible", she says.
The revelation
Diane read not once, not twice, but several times that email sent by her son in 2018.
He said he didn't want anything from her. I just wanted to get to know her and maybe explore the possibility of a bond.
He said that he had had a happy life and that his adoptive parents gave him everything he needed.
"And then he said, 'By the way, just so you know, you're a grandmother.'"
He had attached a photo of his granddaughter. "Now we know where her curly hair comes from," he wrote.
Diane remembers that when she saw the photo, she knew that whoever was on the other side had to be her son.
"I looked at that picture of my granddaughter. And just to my left, there were a bunch of shelves with books and pictures on top. And there was one of me from when I was her age, probably two and a half or three. It was like we were twins. My head was spinning," says Diane.
Then came the rapid investigation to get to the truth.
Diane dedicated hours to researching what could have happened at that Sydney hospital in 1976.
In this search, he found an organization specializing in advice and support in adoption cases in Brisbane.
She called them and heard on the other end: "You're not the only one."
That day, Diane began a personal journey that she describes as "very painful."
But also, she says, a journey that led her to reunite with her son and his family.
The reunion
After receiving this news, Diane was deeply shaken. I felt like a huge wound was being reopened.
He was afraid that the secret he had kept for so long would destroy the life he had built. She didn't know how her children would react to this part of her story, which had weighed on her for so many years.
But they responded well and supported her in everything that came after.
Ultimately, Diane decided to respond to the email and then travel to meet her oldest son.
"Initially, he and his family were going to come to see me, but then it all started to seem too overwhelming for me. I think I was trying to control the situation. We decided that I would fly there to meet them," he recalls.
She took a flight to Sydney. When he got off the plane, he saw him for the first time. "There he was, standing with a small bouquet of white flowers."
"He gave me a huge hug and I just didn't want to let go," he recalls.
Then they went to his house and she met his daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
By now, Diane already knew that her son's adoptive parents had also been deceived.
"They were told that his mother couldn't take care of him, that she wanted him to be adopted by a religious family, that she wanted him to be given a certain name and to send photographs to a specific address," he says.
She would later discover that her son's adoptive mother had sent him letters for years.
"The first time I met them, I had flown to Sydney to attend my grandson's school concert. We were sitting having a bite to eat before going and suddenly she (his adoptive mother) leaned over to me, put her hand over mine and said, 'Thank you'."
"And I looked at her thinking, 'Oh, did you want the salt or something?'
Diane says that moment made her break down: "My God, I had to gather all my strength...".
"This is the contradiction you need to live with. He was conceived in a loving relationship. He was adopted, despite all the pain I went through, and even more so now that I know the truth about what happened... But they raised my son, they loved him, they cared for him, they did everything for him. They were wonderful people, with extraordinary kindness", he reflects.
Today, Diane continues to cultivate her bond with her son and her entire family.
"I can't change anything that happened. The people who were involved, the norms and the culture... But what I want to do is dedicate my energy to building a relationship with my son, who I lost for 40 years," he says.
"Of course I felt angry. And I saw some people consumed by those emotions. But the joy of having my family together is something so overwhelmingly powerful... That's what I want to cultivate and enjoy right now."
This report is based on an episode of the BBC's Outlook program. You can listen to it in English by clicking here.
*With production and text by Isabel Caro.
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