Liz today
Two years ago, Liz Wilde wrote a heart-wrenching piece in YOU describing her quest to find out more about her late birth mother. A week later she received an email from a stranger in America…
Exactly two years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine about my mother Valerie, who had been forced to give me up for adoption in 1963 ‒ and the heartbreak she had experienced. I never dreamt it could lead to a new connection to her.
By the time I wrote my article, I had resigned myself to never knowing more than the basic facts about this crucial time in my mother’s life. Yet, one week after publication, a lady called Lyn emailed me from America to say she had been very moved by my article – and that she had been in the same mother-and-baby home at the same time as my mother. Valerie was not alone. At least half a million women lost their children in the same way in the UK during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, due to the stigma of being unmarried mothers.