By Nicky Campbell
Last updated at 9:35 AM on 9th April 2011
The day I met the woman who gave birth to me was the most terrifying of my life. I sat nervously gulping Guinness in a Dublin hotel waiting for her to walk through the door. I was about to enter a parallel universe. I was on the threshold of a brand new past.
Mum and Dad had told me I was adopted from as far back as I can remember, so there was no awful discovery lurking in adolescence or early adulthood, as all too often happens.
But even though I knew all along, in the back of my mind there were always questions. I had a lingering feeling of incompleteness and an aching need for answers.
Long-lost siblings: DJ and TV presenter Nicky Campbell and his birth sister Esther who have written a book about their adoption
Ironically, it had taken the tempestuous course of my first marriage in the late 1980s and the emotional mess I had become for me to summon up the strength, confidenceand motivation to set about finding my mother, Stella. But with no professional support and no therapy, I had no idea what I was taking on. In fact, all I had was a phone number.
I was 29 when Stella answered my phone call in 1990 and nervously asked, ‘Who is this?’. The first day of the rest of my life had begun. Then came that first meeting in a Dublin bar – but this mother-and-child reunion was no Hollywood classic. I kissed Stella as I would a friend’s elderly aunt.
I bumbled. She rambled. I stumbled. And then, for emotional relief from the raging inferno of confusion, I ambled to the gents. My head was throbbing. When I turned to the sink to wash my hands, I glanced up. I shall never forget that moment and I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it: I looked in the mirror and saw someone else. Meeting someone I was related to for the first time changed everything.
Stella was a good woman but she’d had a difficult life and a number of breakdowns during the course of it. She was a Dublin Protestant who had given birth to two children by two different Catholic men, both considerably younger than her. The pressures of the time and moral values of the age bore down on her free spirit, but never completely crushed it.
When I helped to carry her coffin and spoke at her funeral surrounded by weirdly familiar strangers on a cold autumn day in 2008, almost 20 years later, it was another day of mind-chilling intensity. I am so thankful and proud that I knew Stella, though. I wouldn’t change a thing.
After meeting my mother I was traced by her other long-lost baby, Esther, my half-sister. She is 18 months my senior and we are still very close. I also encountered cousins flabbergasted by the secret life of their Auntie Stella. It was a lot to take in.
When I went on to have children of my own about ten years ago, my curiosity gained fresh impetus and I tracked down the man she’d had that affair with back in the dark ages of Ireland in 1960 – my father. And then came his children too. Every meeting was as incredible and highly charged as the last.
Good woman: Nicky's mum Stella was a Dublin Protestant who had given birth to two children by two different Catholic men
These are experiences so beyond the normal scope of our emotional territory. They do not happen every day. Mind you, when the doorbell goes now my wife Tina jokes, ‘That’ll be another bloody relative.’
I am still in regular close contact with my biological father and also a sibling here, a sibling there and a cousin or two, which is fantastic, but I also have what the Americans call ‘closure’. There is nothing left to resolve. No mystery to solve.
So when ITV approached me to co-present Long Lost Family, a new series with Davina McCall that helps people track down missing relatives, I was excited because I’d been there.
But I was also cautious – I knew what it meant to arrive at that moment in life. Being a patron of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, I was mindful that this had to be done properly and responsibly. People couldn’t be flung into these highly emotional meetings just for the sake of good TV. There is too much of that kind of reckless abandon on the box these days.
I needn’t have been concerned.
The way the programme makers handled the issues was exemplary.
The same company had made the superb Who Do You Think You Are?, which I was lucky enough to have been a subject on a few years ago in a hugely sensitive story about my adoptive dad. The astonishing, heart-warming and at times heartbreaking stories in Long Lost Family have been humbling to be a part of. The series has taken me all over the globe and I’ve never been involved in anything that is so profoundly moving and genuinely life-changing as this in my career.
Professionally and personally, it has been a unique experience.
Let me tell you about a couple of the reunions we made happen on the show. One was in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, between two lovely women in their mid-60s, who had been separated as tiny infants. They are identical twins. One of them didn’t even know she had a sister. As they walked towards each other, their footsteps quickened and you could almost feel their hearts beating. You knew this was just meant to be.
Davina and I wandered over to each other at the top of a hill in the park as we watched from afar. We looked at each other and we were both in floods of tears. That was such a happy day. We also helped 43-year-old Karen, from Warwickshire, who’d grown up thinking her mum was her older sister and her grandparents were her mum and dad.
Since she discovered the truth, she had spent decades on a fruitless search for her real father. But we found him in Canada and brought him back to Britain for a reunion.
It has been a privilege that, in just a tiny way, I have been a part of something that has helped people achieve the same peace of mind it took me so long to find. Make no mistake, it can be a rocky road. The initial high-voltage emotional exhilaration inevitably fades – and then what? Also the turmoil for families conf ronted with a whole new dynamic can be overwhelming. But it all comes back to the question asked in that other programme.
Who do you think you are? Until we feel at one with ourselves, no one can truly look in the mirror and answer it. And I should know.
Long Lost Family starts on ITV1, Thursday 21 April, 9pm.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1374410/Nicky-Campbell-I-I-MY-MUM.html?ITO=1490
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