One morning in late September 2023, I accidentally found out that my birth mother had been killed almost a year earlier. I came across this while searching my work email for a missing message. In the trash folder, among a bunch of irrelevant press releases, was an unread email flagging a long-forgotten Google alert I had set up for her name, Susan Barras. We had been estranged for nearly 15 years, so seeing that alone made me anxious. I had cut off contact with her when our relationship became too stressful and emotionally draining for me to handle. When I opened the email, I was shocked to realize the alert was triggered by a probate notice about her estate.
Susan was only 69 when she died, and my first thought was that the breast cancer she was being treated for when we were still in touch had come back. My second thought was that both my birth parents were now deadāmy birth father had died of liver failure in late 2018 at age 70. But then the unfamiliar name on the probate notice, Suzann Doyle, caught my attention. Below that, it confirmed that my birth mother had changed her name. Her address at the time of her death raised more questions. It wasnāt the big detached house in Guildford I had visited just once, a few months after we reconnected, where she lived with her husband. This address was for a tiny one-bedroom retirement flat overlooking Guildford train station.
I called the law firm listed on the probate notice. At first, they seemed hesitant to talk, probably because as an adoptee I had no legal claim to my birth motherās estate. But eventually, a solicitor told me that in late November 2022, Susan was hit by a car and died hours later in the hospital. The solicitor added that her two adult stepchildren had been informed, but not her younger sister, who, like me, only got in touch after seeing the notice. This, along with the fact that Susan left her entire estate (including her personal belongings) to charity, suggested she might have been estranged from the rest of her family too.
In the days that followed, I tried to figure out what had happened in Susanās life since we last met and the circumstances of her death. Through the solicitor, I managed to speak for the first time to Susanās sister and her best friend. From them, I learned that Susan had undergone bowel cancer surgery a few months before she was killed. She had changed her name and moved after a bitter split from her husband, who later died of cancer. Susan had cut off contact with her mother, her sister, and her brother, around the same time I had broken ties with her. She had also recently fallen out with her best friend, who told me this had happened many times since they were in school together. Unsurprisingly, given how isolated she seemed, there was no funeral. Her ashes were scattered on the Isle of Wight, but no one I spoke to knew exactly where or by whom.
Adoption is often compared to a ghost world, where the adoptee, the birth parents, and the adoptive parents are haunted by specters of the past. For birth parents, the main ghost is the child they lost to adoption. For the adopted person, itās their birth mother. They might also be haunted by the ghost of their birth father; the child they were before adoption; the imagined life they could have had if they werenāt adopted; the ghost of the child their adoptive parents longed for; and possibly the ghost of the child their adoptive parents may have lost or couldnāt conceive. Even after both my birth parents died, their specters remain, because literally and figuratively, they were never laid to rest. My birth father didnāt have a funeral because he was a poor alcoholic. I was left wondering how to mourn parents who had been a ghostly absence in my life for so long, and whose loss I had already grieved for many years.
Adoption has long been seen as a fairytale ending by the British public. Children are widely considered lucky to beI was āsavedā from birth families who were seen as unwilling, unable, or unfit to care for them. Strangely enough, adoption reunions are also pushed as happy-ever-after stories by emotional reality TV shows like Davina McCallās Long Lost Family. My own experience felt like walking into artist Cornelia Parkerās exploded shed, with all the burnt wreckage hanging dangerously around me.
[Image: David is held by his birth mother, Susan Barras; her mother is beside her. Photo courtesy of David Batty]
It all started in May 1974, when my adoptive parents, Brian and Paula, took me from a Christian adoption agency in Muswell Hill, north London, to their home in Brighouse, a town in West Yorkshire. Like many adoptive parents back then, they decided it was best to treat me āthe sameā as if I were their biological child. (I have an older sister and a younger brother who are my parentsā birth children.) At the time, psychologists and social workers believed adopted babies were blank slates that could be shaped to fit their new families. A few weeks before he died last November, I talked about this article with my adoptive dad and asked him about the circumstances of my adoption. He said he and my adoptive mum, who passed away in 2020, were given no advice on how to raise me, except that they should tell me I was adopted between the ages of five and ten, whenever it felt right. When I was told at age seven, my adoptive dad remembered that I didnāt show any reaction. He said he and my mum explained that I was special because I had been āchosen,ā following the expert advice of the time, which claimed this would comfort children suddenly dealing with feelings of abandonment. (I donāt remember anything about that moment except my adoptive sister, then 11, comforting me as I cried in the garden shed.)
I scanned the crowd for my birth mother. I saw a small, thin woman with a sharp bob haircut. āPlease donāt let it be her,ā I thought. Of course, it was.
As a child and young adult, I had no idea how to understand or express the loss of my birth family, or how it had affected my sense of who I was. As a teenager, I started searching through my parentsā bedroom cupboard for any adoption records they had, eventually finding an incomplete version when I was 15. I was shocked to learn that my birth father was Iranianāsomething my white British adoptive parents had never mentioned. Based on the documents in the file, it seemed the adoption agency had downplayed my mixed ethnicity because I āpassedā as white. The agencyās first letter to my adoptive parents said: āYou will notice that the babyās father comes from a Persian family, but the baby, who is very fair, shows no sign of any colour.ā According to my adoptive dad, the agency said my ethnic background didnāt matter and there was no need to tell me about it.
Although I always planned to find my birth parents, I waited until I felt independent, secure, and strong enough to do so. In 2003, I contacted the Post Adoption Centre (now PAC-UK) in north London for help finding my birth mother, who I knew from the records had lived in Twickenham, south-west London. I had to attend counselling before our reunion, because adoptions before the Adoption Act of 1976 were āclosed,ā and some birth parents were led to believe their children would never be able to find out their original names or family. So my PAC-UK adviser acted as a go-between and wrote a letter to Susan in the autumn of 2004, explaining who I was and why I was trying to reach her.
Around the same time, I received a more complete version of my adoption file. What struck me when I read through it again recently was how judgmental they were of my birth mother for being unmarried. It seemed to confirm Susanās account that she was pressured into giving me up. In the UK, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, about 185,000 unmarried women were forced to give up babies they wanted to keep. A 2022 parliamentary human rights inquiry…Iry called this scandal āa violation of family life.ā From what I can see in the records, my birth mother got in touch with the adoption agency soon after she found out she was pregnant. After I was born, I was placed with a foster mother. The file doesnāt mention what initial conversations happened about my future. But the records show that Susan took me back a month later. At that point, the adoption agency stepped in to try to talk her out of keeping me, and also discouraged her parents from adopting me. They warned that an āunnaturalā family setup would likely turn me into a juvenile delinquent. The reverend who ran the Baptist adoption agency called my birth mother, who was 20 at the time, a ārebellious daughterā and āa determined but probably disturbed girl.ā He added, āI wouldnāt be surprised to find out that over the years there had been conflict between her parents about how she should be disciplined.ā
View image in fullscreen: David as a baby. Photograph courtesy of David Batty.
Susanās heartfelt first letter to me in November 2004 didnāt raise any warning signs about our reunion. She wrote, āI want you to know that not a single day has gone by when I havenāt thought about you and wondered how you were and what you were doing.ā But her second letter seemed to hint at parts of the adoption agencyās assessment of her emotional state from 30 years ago. She wrote, āI went to Chiswick school, where I learned the fine arts of how to ānut,ā āgive bother,ā and āput in the boot.āā After describing her extended British and Irish family, sometimes with faint praise that felt damning, she added, āI should warn you that most of my early life was terribly unhappy, and I never got along with my family (and still donāt). I rarely see them. As a result, telling you about it might be emotionally painful for me, but I owe it to you to give you any and all information you need.ā
This letter also gave me the first description of my birth fatherāan Iranian student she met in a business studies course at Luton Polytechnic in 1973. āHe was quite serious (and, sadly, a bit too religious for my taste),ā she wrote, though I later found out this description didnāt match reality at all. Susan said they dated for six months until she found out she was pregnant, and then he decided to go to a university in Detroit, Michigan. She added, āI have no idea where he is now or what happened to him, and to be honest, I donāt care.ā
Looking back now at our letters and my adoption file, these were some of the clear signs of the problems that later affected our relationship. But at the time, I didnāt focus on them. I was more interested in reading about what we had in common: a love of art, architecture, design, and literature. So it wasnāt until Susan and I met in the spring of 2005 in Tate Modernās Turbine Hall that I first felt a sense of dread. I remember scanning the crowd with the Baptist reverendās description of her in mind: āShe is a slim, attractive girl with long fair hair and rather pointed features.ā My eyes landed on a small, thin woman in black, with a somewhat severe dyed blond bob. There was something brittle about her manner that bothered me. To my surprise, my first thought was, āPlease donāt let it be her.ā Of course, it was.
View image in fullscreen: Davidās birth mother, Susan, in Paleros, Greece ā¦
View image in fullscreen: ā¦ and his birth father, Monti, in Reseda, California. Photographs courtesy of David Batty.
Susan was smart and funny, making dry jokes about the artsy language in the galleryās picture captions. In the Tate membersā bar, she pulled out several envelopes stuffed with family photos. Seeing my own features in the pictures of these relatives hit me harder than I expected. Looking back, it was telling that she didnāt acknowledge how much I resembled the two men she had the most complicated and painful memories of: her father and my birth father. Susan promised to give me a photo of my birth father but never did. Instead,At that first meeting, she handed me a printout of a miniature Persian portrait of a Qajar prince, which she said looked like me. “Well, you get the idea,” she said, adding that her mother was worried she was “going to have a black baby.”
During the time we were reunited, I only met two members of Susan’s family. Her younger brother, who seemed shy, joined us in the members’ room at the Royal Academy in London. We barely exchanged a word to break the awkward silence. A few months later, I met Susan’s husband, Terence, a lawyer and occasional property developer, at their home in Guildford. He seemed kind and gentle, though there was a sadness about him. When Susan was out of earshot, he came over and whispered, “Everything’s going to be all right now you’re back.” This suggested that things hadn’t been all right before.
Over the next three years, Susan and I met every six to eight weeks, usually for lunch and an exhibition in London. At first, our conversations balanced talking about our current livesāmine as a journalist and later an art student, hers as a grammar school teacherāand our shared past. But over time, Susan became more and more focused on the circumstances of my adoption and how it had affected her emotionally. Her expressions of hurt and anger, usually directed at her parents, whom she felt hadn’t supported her before, during, or after my adoption, grew longer and more intense. She said my birth had been physically traumatic and that she had broken her coccyx during labor. She was devastated to learn that I hadn’t received the handwritten note she had hidden in my baby clothes before handing me over to the adoption social worker. She said she had post-traumatic stress disorder and had been in therapy for 25 years. (Her best friend later insisted Susan had never been in therapy.)
Another time, Susan took issue with a letter she said she received from my adoptive mother after the adoption was finalized, which she described as condescendingly Christian. She said she had spent years trying to find me and, unsettlingly, had come very closeāshe had figured out that I lived in Halifax, the town next to the one where I grew up. At another meeting, she claimed she had been told I died when I was 16. The mood became increasingly suffocating.
At midnight on my birthday, she wrote, “Maybe you’ll respond to this and maybe you won’t, but at least you’ll know I’m still thinking of you.”
Several months after our reunion, my PAC-UK support worker admitted that she thought Susan had seemed “fragile” when they first spoke on the phone. I replied, “She doesn’t want me. She wants her baby back.” This realization, though painful, summed up the gap between me and Susan. She couldn’t let go of the loss that had defined her life. She would never get to experience raising me. Here I was, an independent adult with another family’s history and memories. I think she wanted me to need her, to depend on her, as if I were a child. But I felt like I was dealing with a vulnerable teenage girl who had been emotionally stuck at the point of my adoption. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you,” she would say over and over, leaving me to wonder if I was supposed to feel guilty for that.
Years later, after I found out my birth mother had died, I told this story in a phone call with her best friend. The friend recalled visiting Susan in Athens, Greece, two years after my adoption. She was shocked to find Susan’s apartment bare, except for one photograph on her bedside tableāa studio portrait of me at seven months old, sent by my adoptive parents through the agency. That was the image of me she had held onto during the decades we were apart.
The breaking point came over dinner at a Turkish restaurant in Mayfair, London, when I told her about a conversation with my adoptive parents and referred to her as my birth mother. She became furious and shouted, “I hate that term. I wasn’t a b…””Rood mare.” She paused to catch her breath, then added, “Your father wanted me to have an abortion. I hope you realize that.” I’d always suspected that at least one of my birth parents might have considered aborting me, but it still hurt to have it thrown at me in public. I took her words to mean: you owe me your life. A few days later, she sent an email bluntly saying that this was something she’d needed to say. There was no acknowledgment that her remarks might have upset me.
My replies to her emails became slower and less frequent. Eventually, I stopped responding to her requests to meet. She kept messaging me for another two years, including at midnight on my birthday. In February 2008, she sent an email with the subject line “confused.” She wrote, “Maybe you’ll respond to this and maybe you won’t, but at least you’ll know I’m still thinking of you.” Eventually, I emailed back saying I was cutting contact because I couldn’t handle her dumping her resentment toward her mother and late fatherāand, to a lesser extent, her brother and sisterāon me anymore. I added that it felt like she was trying to recruit me as an ally in a long-standing family conflict, instead of letting me meet my grandmother, aunt, and uncle on my own terms. I ended the email by asking her not to contact me again unless I reached out first. I never heard from her again.
I searched for that email again after finding out Susan had died. Looking back now, I can sympathize more with her emotional pain. While she was wrong to treat our meetings like therapy sessions, we both lacked the support we needed to avoid hurting ourselves and each other again. In my grief, I deleted the messageāI suspect because, on some level, it reminded me of the original trauma of our separation as mother and baby. Now, her death meant a permanent separation.
For many years, tracing my birth father, Monti, seemed impossible; there’s very little support here for adoptees looking for non-British birth parents. I tried to find him a couple of times in my late 20s and early 30s, but I only pursued it seriously in my late 30s, after reuniting with my birth mother. A Google search of his name brought up a recently published blogāin Persianāby someone who matched the details in my adoption file. Translating the blog confirmed this was my birth father. I was surprised to learn that after studying in the US, he returned to Iran and became a broadcast journalist: without knowing it, I had followed in his footsteps. His career seemed to fade after he moved to the US in the 1990s, eventually settling in Los Angeles. He had legally changed his name, taking a more English-sounding first name. Most importantly, the blog revealed he was divorced and had another son, Bryan, who was half my age. I decided to do nothing until this boy turned 18, worried that I might be stepping into another broken family.
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In early January 2017, a few months after my half-brother turned 18, I went through his Facebook account and found a post he made in 2013 for US National Siblings Day. It said: āTo my half-brother who I will probably never meet ā¦ He doesnāt know I exist.ā That week, I hired a private detective in LA, who tracked down Monti within 24 hours and said he cried on the phone when told I was trying to find him. I first spoke to my birth father on the day of Donald Trumpās first inauguration, which also marked the start of the ban on Iranian citizens traveling to the US. Monti gave me a very different account of his relationship with Susan than hers. He claimed they lived together in his flat in southwest London and that she suggested moving to Detroit to raise me while he was at university in Michigan. More worrying, though, was the way he slurred his words. When my half-brother reached out to me on Twitter the next day, he confirmed my suspicion that Monti was an alcoholic.
Still, three months later, I flew to LA for two weeks to meet them. I had already built a bond with Bryan, and we texted several times a day. The reunion couldnāt have been more different from the one with Susan. But as Leo Tolstoyās famous opening line in Anna Karenina says, āevery unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.ā Certainly, everything had gone wrong in my birth fatherās household. The dashing young man in military uniform from the photos on the blog, and the cheerful, energetic Iranian TV journalist who had reported from the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq war, refugee camps, and minersā strikes, were both long gone. He had holes in his shoes. He was living in an RV after being evicted. He never told me directly how he ended up like this. But he said his first wife, an Iranian TV producer, had been killedānearly decapitatedāin a car crash, and his youngest sister had been murdered in Rome in 1983. According to Italian press reports, a Pan-Arab Jordanian terrorist had mistakenly shot her dead; his intended target, the Emirati ambassador to Italy, only had minor injuries.
View image in fullscreen
In front of an image of Monti ā¦
View image in fullscreen
ā¦ and looking at digital negatives made from Montiās photographs. Photographs: Lydia Goldblatt/The Guardian
In March 2017, I met Monti at his favorite Persian restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, along with my half-brother. Monti took my face in his hands, studying it, before expressing disappointment that neither of his sons had inherited his cleft chin. Bryan was tense with anger throughout the meal. It was only afterward, when we walked out to Montiās car, that I understood why. The old station wagonās bumper was crumpled. The interior was covered in a thick layer of cigarette ash. The seats were piled with takeout boxes, which my half-brother embarrassedly threw away. As a metaphor for my birth fatherās life, it couldnāt have been more obvious. Later that fortnight, Monti showed up to another dinner wearing a foam support girdle over his shirt, which he said heād been wearing since his belly button āexplodedā due to an umbilical hernia. After he bad-mouthed Bryanās mother, I asked him why he married her. āI just wanted a son,ā he replied, adding wistfully, āI should have stayed with your mother.ā Later that week, he didnāt show up.I was supposed to meet him at his storage unit to go through family photos and documentary films. Instead, he got drunk. Monti died of liver failure 18 months later. Because of the long distance between us and his worsening alcoholism, we stayed distant. But my relationship with Bryan is closeāI visited him again in 2023, and we text regularly. After Monti died, Bryan went through a series of crises, including homelessness, but now he works as an adviser for vulnerable people in LA. I’ve tried to make sure our bond isn’t built on trauma. Still, I’m the only person he can talk to about his father. He recently said that having me in his life has helped him cope with his grief. During a Zoom call soon after Monti’s death, he got upset and said, “I can’t do this. You look so much like him.” As I’ve gotten older, the resemblance has grown stronger, and it sometimes still surprises me when I look in the mirror.
Both of my birth parents followed similar paths. They became more and more estranged from their families and died in tragic ways. But Monti’s trauma wasn’t linked to my adoption, and his family wasn’t as deeply affected by it as Susan’s was. Last December, one of his surviving sisters reached out to me on social media. Over the next few weeks, she helped me piece together more of my Iranian family’s history, including several ancestors who held high-ranking positions during the Qajar dynasty. That contact ended when the US and Israeli bombings of Tehran beganāshe and four other close relatives live there. Now, like many others in the Iranian diaspora, I anxiously hope to hear that they’re safe.
With Susan, a lot is still unresolved. Last November, as calls grew for the government to apologize to those affected by forced adoption, I showed my records to Dr. Michael Lambert, a historian of the British welfare state at Lancaster University and an expert witness for the 2022 parliamentary inquiry. He said the assessments of Susan and her family by the reverend and a moral welfare officerāa type of social worker focused on unmarried mothersāweren’t based on facts but on biased assumptions, included to support the case for my adoption. Lambert says, “The reports claim that your birth mother can’t possibly be a fit mother because she was raised in an improper way, and that getting pregnant was her way of acting out for attention. This follows the Church of England’s narrative at the time that unmarried mothers can’t be good parents. They’re portrayed as promiscuous and a bad influence.”
In February, I attended the trial in Guildford of the man accused of killing Susan by careless driving. I saw a grainy black-and-white screenshot from CCTV footage taken just before the collision. She looked thin and fragile, but her walk seemed determined. I heard witnesses describe how she shouted “stop” at the approaching car before being knocked to the ground, her head hitting the road with an audible crack. She died from internal bleeding 12 hours later in the hospital. The driver, who said he hadn’t seen her because of the low winter sun, was found not guilty. It felt like once again, Susan’s trauma had been filtered through a legal process that didn’t put her at the center.
I never expected that reunion alone would resolve the complexities of being an adoptee. I’ve paid for therapyāsince no free therapy is available for adult adopteesāand it’s helped me better navigate the three families I’m part of. Despite the stress and anxiety I’ve gone through, I don’t regret either reunion. There’s power in learning about yourself and connecting with your cultural heritage, which the adoption system erased. Maybe an official apology to adoptees and birth parents affected by forced adoptionāsomething children’s minister Josh MacAlister said in March the government is actively consideringāwill help resolve the sense of injustice around my adoption and others. But any apology will come too late.I grieve for my birth mother, and I can’t undo the loss we both went through. For many adoptees, including me, coping with that loss is something that lasts a lifetime.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the experience you described
General Emotional Questions
Q What does it feel like to meet a birth parent after decades
A It can be very confusing You might feel a mix of hope anxiety anger and sadness all at once Its rarely the instant happiness you see in movies
Q Why wasnt it a fairytale ending for you
A Fairytales skip the hard parts In real life decades of separation create different lives different traumas and a lot of awkwardness We were strangers trying to be family
Q Did you feel angry at your mother when you finally met
A Yes sometimes I understood why she gave me up but I also felt grief for the years we lost Anger and gratitude can exist at the same time
Practical Relationship Questions
Q How did you even find each other after so long
A It took a lot of patience and paperwork
Q What was the first conversation actually like
A Awkward We were both nervous and careful We stuck to safe topics at firstjobs hobbiesbefore slowly trying to talk about the past
Q Do you have a relationship with her now
A Its complicated We talk occasionally but were still figuring out what we are to each other Its not like a normal motherdaughter relationship
Advice Reflection
Q What is the biggest mistake people make when expecting a reunion
A Expecting it to fix everything Reunion doesnt erase the trauma of the adoption or the years of separation It just adds a new complex layer to your life
Q What advice would you give to someone about to meet their birth parent
A Lower your expectations Go in with curiosity not a script Be ready for them to be a flawed real person not a perfect hero or villain And give yourself permission to feel whatever you feel
Q Is it worth it to meet them even if its hard
A For me yes Even though it wasnt a happy ending it gave me
