Mother and daughter reunite

A sad tale of abandonment, adoption and domestic violence has had a happy ending for a Warkworth mother, Rosemary Allan, and her daughter Rebecca Rowe.

Rebecca, who lives in Brisbane with her partner and four children, flew into NZ last month to share her 50th birthday with her mother whom she remembers seeing only once before in her life.

“Mum has missed out on so much of my life, I wanted to share this milestone birthday with her,” Rebecca says.

When Rebecca was born in Auckland in 1973, her mother was living at home with an abusive stepfather experiencing a level of violence that could have seen him jailed if anyone had bothered to press charges. Rosemary says she felt she had no choice but to foster her newborn, and then eventually, give Rebecca up for adoption.

“But I never stopped loving her, not for a minute. I would think about her every day,” Rosemary says. “I hoped I had done the right thing; that I was giving her the chance of a better life.”

But Rebecca’s experience in foster care was far from happy. She was passed from family to family, often denied access to school and made to work in part-time jobs from the age of 11. She also experienced the sort of physical violence her mother had tried to shield her from.

“I grew up feeling very angry towards her [Rosemary] and held on to the anger for most of my life.

“My adopted parents made up horrid stories about Mum and I believed them, so I didn’t want anything to do with her.

“It wasn’t until a relative got in touch through social media, and I had a chance to talk to Mum’s older sister, that I learned the truth. Everything I’d been told while in foster care was lies and I realised that what happened all those years ago, had been out of Mum’s control.”

Mother and daughter finally reunited six years ago and now keep in constant contact.

The birthday in Warkworth was made even more poignant when they remembered all the birthdays in between that they had missed.