Liverpool courier Pat Corlett logged into Facebook one day to find a message from a stranger waiting for her.
Chris Haworth, 36, wrote "Hi my name is Chris and I was born on 22nd June 1975. You may not want to reply to this ..."
The last time Pat had seen Chris — known then as David — was when he was six days old and she was giving him up for adoption.
"It was like a bomb going off, but a nice bomb," Pat, 54, said of the unexpected contact.
Chris told his birth mother that he enjoyed a happy childhood with his adoptive family, and now works as a coach driver. He kept David as his middle name.
Pat had long wondered what happened to the little boy she gave up when she was just 18, but was hesitant to search for him.
"I always said I'd never trace him, that it might be too disruptive for him or upsetting, but I often wondered whether he would try to find me," Pat told The Daily Mail.
In 1975, Pat was working away from home at a guest house. She discovered she was pregnant shortly after breaking up with her boyfriend. Alone and overwhelmed, she decided she wanted her son to have a better upbringing than she had.
Pat never knew her father and wanted her son to have two parents. So when Chris was six days old, she handed him over to adoption authorities.
Pat went on to marry Bob, her husband of 33 years. When they struggled with fertility issues, Pat couldn't help but think of the son she no longer knew.
"It was especially painful, of course, because of the baby I had given up," Pat said. "I thought about him every day, especially as we were trying so hard to have children. In the end we started to look into adoption."
Bob and Pat eventually had two sons: Andrew, now 18, and Michael, who died in 2003 at the age of 7 from Burkett's lymphoma.
Shortly following Michael's death, Andrew asked his mother if he could have another brother.
She told him the truth about Chris.
Now Chris and Andrew are getting along like brothers.
"Chris coming back in our lives is like the rounding off of a story," Pat said. "He can never replace Michael, of course, but to have him with us is a real happy ending."
(Photo credit: AFP)
261 comments