I longed to find out why I was adopted then discovered my parents were siblings – I felt so dirty & disgusting
GROWING up in a loving home Teresa Weiler had little interest in finding out about her biological parents.
Raised from the age of two by dad Terence and mum Truda in London, Teresa, now 65, had known her whole life that she was adopted.
Yet she knew very little about her birth parents and had no plans to track them down – until her nephew’s birth got her thinking about having children of her own someday.
Initially, she could see no harm in finding out more about her early years, but what she discovered meant she spent two decades trying to cover up the shocking truth.
Her biological parents were in fact related – they were brother and sister.
Speaking as part of Life Stories, Fabulous’ new YouTube series which documents the extraordinary lives of ordinary people, Teresa says: “My childhood was a very happy one.
“I didn’t come to my parents until I was two and a half going on three.
“They already had two boys older than me. In those days people weren’t really told much about their background to the children they were adopting.
“I think all my parents knew was that I had an Irish mother who was unmarried and had given me up for adoption straight away.”
It was during her early twenties when Teresa made the decision to delve into her history.
“I secretly decided to find out how I would go about this, and that’s really where the story began,” she explains.
Teresa requested her adoption records from social services and seven months later she travelled to the council offices where she was given access to her file.
“To begin with, I read that my mum, as I knew, was an unmarried mother,” she recalls.
“She was only 16, and therefore had not been in a position to bring me up and as I read further down the page it started to give details of other people including that of my father.”
Nothing could’ve prepared Teresa for the bombshell which came next.
She says: “I read that my father was my mother’s brother, and was 14 at the time that I had been conceived.
“The bottom dropped out of my world.
“I’ve been brought up in a Catholic household. Sex before marriage was frowned upon let alone something like this.
“It was incest at the end of the day and this was something that I needed to keep to myself and never tell anybody.
“All of a sudden I had become a horrendous, dirty secret, I actually felt physically sick as I was reading it.
“It was beyond anything I had expected to read, I felt like I could never tell anybody this.
“I felt unworthy and like if they knew (my parents) they would never have adopted me.
“That if I told anybody, and my siblings found out they would not want to have anything to do with me.
“I just felt dirty.”
After learning the truth, Teresa felt she had a difficult decision to make.
She explains: “I decided, if I have children something terrible is going to happen to them, or they will have some disability, and that will be my fault.
“And so, having wanted children so badly, I decided that I simply couldn’t have them and that I couldn’t take that risk.
“From then on if ever a relationship got too far and that we were starting to be serious or starting to have those conversations, I had to get out of it.
Everyone around me would ask about me settling down and having children and I would have to keep finding excuses…it definitely affected my mental health.
Teresa Weiler
“So I threw myself into being an auntie because that was going to be the next best thing.
“I built very good relationships with all my nieces and nephews and that was my compensation that if I couldn’t be a mum I’d be the best, auntie.
“Everyone around me would ask about me settling down and having children and I would have to keep finding excuses.
“It definitely affected my mental health.”
After living with her secret for years, in 1985 she went one step further and made the decision to try to meet her biological parents face to face.
“After a couple of years, I started to think maybe I should meet my mum and try and see things from her point of view,” Teresa says.
“There was a register that you could put your name on to say that you were looking for your parents and there was a register for parents who were looking for children.
“It wasn’t long before I was contacted by the social services, and I was given an address to go to.”
Teresa made the journey to meet her mum in secret and was surprised by what she found.
A gentleman who she introduced as her friend who was supporting her today, but I am a hundred percent certain that was my father, her brother.
Teresa
“When she opened the door the first thing that knocked me sideways was that she looked like me, and I’d grown up never looking like anyone,” she remembers.
“She was quite distant and I was quite cold and angry so it wasn’t the greatest of atmospheres.
“As I went in, there sitting in the corner on a chair was somebody else who looked like me.
“A gentleman who she introduced as her friend who was supporting her today, but I am a hundred percent certain that was my father, her brother.
“That made me even more angry because I felt she was not telling me the truth already.
“I began asking her all sorts of questions, asking her if she realised what she’d done and how everything was her fault.
“We weren’t there very long before she said to me to go away, write down what you want to ask me, so that we can have a bit more of a conversation.
“The only thing I came away with in terms of any answers was that they were still speaking to each other, and still quite at ease with each other, as they seemed to be in the room,” she says.
“That made me think that it probably wasn’t an assault.”
Teresa left with her mother’s phone number and a few weeks on she tried calling to arrange another meet up – but the line was dead.
Teresa recalls the set back, and says: “I went back to the flat and there was nobody there and the people in the flats around it didn’t know where they’d come from or where they’d gone to.
“I’d just been rejected for the second time and all that did was crash back all my feelings again about how unwanted and unworthy I was, how nobody wanted me.
“She’d got a chance for the second time and she didn’t want me as a grown up.
“Here I was again stuck on my own with a great big secret.”
For the next fifteen years Teresa kept both the brief encounter with her mum and her anguish bottled up.
Then, during a chat with a good friend when she was 41, Teresa struggled to stay silent any longer.
She says: “It all came pouring out.
How does adoption work?
In the UK, there is lengthy process involved with adopting a child and it can take up to six months for the paperwork to be finalised.
To even be considered, you have to meet the following criteria:
- You must be over 21
- You must be a legal resident of the UK for at least 12 months.
- No criminal convictions – especially any related to the endangerment of children. This applies to everyone your household.
You will also have to go through an inital background check and assesment, which will consider whether you are the right fit for adoption.
Potenital parents will also have undergo training and a process to match them with the right child.
“I was sure he would be disgusted but that wasn’t the case at all.
“He assured me that no one would think differently because of where I came from.
“Instead of horror, he only responded with compassion.
“I can’t tell you how good it was to tell somebody – I had spent so long thinking I can never tell anybody.”
A few years later she found the courage to tell her siblings before eventually revealing the truth to her parents ahead of her 50th birthday.
She says: “Having known nothing about my background, they were actually really quite upset, not because of anything I said but because I had had to carry that on my own for so long.
“They were just so upset that I would think I couldn’t tell them or that I would think it would change anything about how they loved me, for me.
“I’m really pleased I told my parents because they were quite elderly and it means that when they did pass I knew we were okay.
“They knew the full story and we were still okay.”
Teresa says that while she regrets keeping her secret to herself for so long, not having children lays heavier.
“Nowadays I would not have made that decision, because I would have been more informed,” Teresa admits, referring to how it’s unlikely her parents’ union would’ve have impacted her children.
“I always felt that I would pass on some dreadful illness to them, as a result of the incest.
“Although I’ve got some health problems, they’ve not necessarily come about as a result of their union.
“But having said that I think by not having children, I became the best auntie so maybe it’s not such a regret as I originally thought.”