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I was six years old when my older sister blurted out that we were all adopted, and this casual bombshell completely devastated me.

Before, I had been in awe of my older siblings and parents, but being adopted meant somehow that I no longer belonged to my beloved family. If I had any doubts, my sister, who was nine at the time, urged me to ask my twelve-year-old brother, because he would have been old enough to remember when I had first been brought home. So, as my brother and sister knew, then everyone knew except me, and for reasons unexplained, my parents hadn’t seen fit to tell me.

Naturally, I didn’t remember the moment when I was separated from my birth mother, (the ‘primal wound’, which I found out much later occurred when I was just one week old), so this new information instantly cast me adrift.

I don’t know why, but I immediately felt the truth of my sister’s words, and my initial sense of isolation was amplified over time because our adoption was not mentioned again by me or anyone else in my family for another eight years. I only confirmed it with my brother when I was 14 and then confronted my mother four years later. In response, she merely shrugged and commented that she was aware that I already knew through ‘channels in the family,’ which I took to mean that my brother had told her. I subsequently found out years later, that my sister had run straight to my mother and told her I knew when I was six.

My mother felt that ‘the cat was out of the bag and if I had any problems with it, I would come to her.’ which was an unusual response, but in her defence, not only was she a very unconventional mother, but she was also quite deeply depressed and spent ten years in bed.

Throughout my early adulthood, despite being naturally curious about my origins, it felt too confrontational and disloyal to look for my birth mother, and perhaps I still lacked the courage or the will to defy or disappoint my adoptive mother, Ruth. Yet, as the fog of her depression lifted and my mistrust of her lessened, we both fought for and eventually achieved a very close bond.

But then Ruth died, and, once again, I felt emotionally unmoored, un-witnessed and alone without my mother in the world.

So, when my six-year-old son asked me if I had a picture of that “other mother who couldn’t take care of me,” I heard his question as a call to action.

“Finding my birth mother was both seismic and deeply cathartic.”

In the past, I had always rationalised away a search. I felt that my curiosity over where my curly hair came from was too trivial and selfish to disturb my birth parents' lives, especially as I had no idea of the circumstances surrounding my arrival in the world. Whatever I uncovered (incest, rape or other crimes or circumstances), I would have to own and incorporate into my life and identity. Lurking in the back of my mind was also a deep-seated fear of rejection. But in the face of Ruth’s death, my utmost fear was that I would be too late to meet anyone from my birth family at all, and so I pushed aside all my reservations with a sense of urgency.

Through lengthy and painstakingly slow research, I found out that my ancestry is both Swiss and Scottish. I learned that I was my mother’s only child, but that my father had been a married man and the father of four boys. I also discovered that my parents were con artists whose jaw-dropping fraud landed them (and the baby bump that was me!) on the front pages of newspapers from New York to Aberdeen.

The New York Times first reported my mother “drowned and presumed dead” after she, my father and a third man had a boating accident in Long Island Sound. Several months later, the story returned to the headlines when my father was suspected of her murder, but when her voice was heard on a wire-tap on Thanksgiving Day, the papers’ leaders read: “'Drowning Victim' Back As Police Dredge Up Plot” and “Drowning Story Didn’t Hold Water, Three Face Charges.”

I eventually met the woman behind the lurid headlines, a woman, my birth mother, Mira, who had been thrilled to conceive me and who fought to keep me. It was heart-warming and heartbreaking to hear of her struggle to give me up after just one week in her arms in a New York hospital. She was less daunted by being a single mother than she was by the relentless notoriety of the case, which was revisited in the papers for years thereafter.

Finding my birth mother was both seismic and at the same time, deeply cathartic. All those roiling emotions dating back from when I was six years old were stirred up and then, over time, dissipated. I was lucky to have met her and be welcomed by her and share in her life for eight years. These years were a healing gift to us both.

Learning about my con artist father was more disquieting, especially as my son and I resemble him physically. We are both present in his face in the photo of his arrest. But in the stories of his charm, glamour and flair for the dramatic, I also detect some echoes of my own personality.

What happened to him, and what of those half-brothers? Would they want to meet me? With Mira’s blessing, I set out to find them.

Duplicity by Donna Freed is published by Muswell Press.

Donna Freed, a native New Yorker, is a writer and translator. She has written for The Oldie and the BBC and co-presents Radio Gorgeous, the UK’s longest-running, all-female podcast. She has lived in London with her family since moving to the UK in 2005.

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