North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Maureen

’t get in contact with her. And then all of a sudden she says, ‘hold on a minute there’s somebody come through the door here maybe you’d like to speak to’ And I says, ‘who’s that?’ She says, ‘hold on a minute, that’ll be Aunt May whose dead, it’s her daughter Mary, so she’ll be your cousin.’ And I said, ‘oh right, I wouldn’t mind’. So Mary come on and she, I had to explain to her then who I was and then of course talking about dogs and jigsaw puzzles, ye know things that you were interested in. Silly things ye know nothing ye know really deep but she stopped in the middle of her sentence and she says to me, ‘Maureen’ she says, ‘hold on a minute’ she says, ‘you’re 54, I’m 56’, she says, ‘and er Alex is 58’ and I went, ‘pardon!’ I says, ‘who’s Alex?’ ‘Ye brother’. I went, ‘oh, could you say that again please?’ ye know it was that big a shock, I didn’t, the blood drained out of me face and she says, ‘yeah, you’re 54, I’m 56 and Alex is 58’ and I says, ‘ye don’t know where he lives?’ ‘Oh’, she says, ‘I haven’t seen him this long time. The last time I think I bumped in to him on the Town Moor, don’t know what he’s doing’. And I says, ‘you couldn’t give me his full name?’ I was trying to write with a shaky hand and the whole big long name and I says, ‘ye have no idea where he lives?’’no’ and I couldn’t wait, ye know to get her off the phone but she was carry, ye know talking on about how she had got a new bed and new curtains and all that and I wasn’t even really listening. I’m going, in my own head, ‘please just tell me some other time’. So erm finished, right enough, she put the phone down, ‘thank goodness’. I couldn’t wait then through to Jeannette, and I’m going, ‘Jeannette, you’ll never guess what’ and she was actually getting her nails done at the time and I’m saying, ‘I’ve got a brother’ and she says, ‘what?’. Oooh then she started to shake and she couldn’t wait to go home so we got in contact with the man who knew at BT and er we asked him to look up this mans, Alexander’s name and address and erm, well Jeannette tried, end up with, I tell a lie she tried BT 912 or something at that time, dot com, I’m not too sure because Jeannette is the computer person, I am not but it was this, and a name came up and also and address but there was no telephone number. He had been erm at BT, he’d had a BT telephone number but then he’d changed to Telewest, changed his number ye see. But we got the number anyway eventually and er Jeannette, says to me, er, ‘Mammy I’ve got this number’ and I says, ‘you phone it’, she ses ‘no mummy you phone it’, I went, ‘no’, I says, ‘don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a number down, but you phone it. Look if it’s not Alex, well, well and good’, I says, ‘but if it is Alex and he doesn’t want to know me I just couldn’t take it. I just don’t want to know. I just because I think, after all of that length of time I was always, maybe the rejections actually ye know, keeping me back, maybe I hadn’t been wanted. Maybe the things I had been told, ye know, through life, that maybe the were true, ye know, there’s no smoke without fire as they say, but that but which wasn’t true. Whenever, it turned out because whenever erm, Jeannette phoned that night and she come back and says, ‘mammy, he’s not in, he’s away to get his son from work’ and I went, huuuoo. And so he’ll not be there for another twenty minutes, so we just talked complete and utter rubbish for twenty minutes, looking at the clock and then she says to me, ‘I’m going to try it again now’. She says, putting the phone down, put the phone down anyway, so she, after a while comes back and says, ‘Mammy it’s him [Maureen getting upset] and he wants to speak to ye’. So I think in the panic of him talking, she says, that wait for me to calm down he’d would phone me but Alex thought that whenever, lets wait for the panic to calm down and I would phone him. So he’s looking at his phone and rattling to look to see if it’s working and I’m looking at my phone to see and in the finish up Will kept saying, ‘has that man phoned yet?’ Because ye see he’d had an operation and he didn’t understand ….. and I says, ‘no’. So in the finish I dialled the phone number and, it was just a crying match [Maureen a bit upset] so it was, and er, so then we didn’t really,