It was like meeting a stranger. Subconsciously you know she's your mother but it was as if she was just someone off the street that I had met," says Stephen Austin of the moment he came face to face with his birth mother.

Recalling that meeting four years ago in an After Adoption office in the region, Stephen, 23, of Azalea Terrace North, Sunderland, admits: "It was the longest three quarters of an hour of my life. It was emotional. I didn't cry but she cried when she saw me. It was just a bit nerve-wracking. I was looking at the ground. I couldn't do eye contact."

Stephen grew up always knowing that he was adopted. But it wasn't until he was 18 that he wanted to find his mother.

Stella and Ray Austin of Burnmoor, are the only mam and dad he has ever known. They adopted him when he was two, a year after adopting his sister when she was three.

This loving couple, who could never have children of their own, were well aware that one day Stephen might want to meet his birth mother.

They were open about this and weren't for standing in his way.

After Adoption helped Stephen meet up with her. What he had never counted on was that things would turn sour so soon.

Like many a mother who has lost her children to adoption she wanted to make up for lost time, says Stephen.

Having left home to be independent he ended up living with his mother for a couple of months and a half sister who, he says, she always put before him.

Stephen, who works in a garage, says: "I felt so ashamed that I wanted to go, but otherwise I would have been living in a cardboard box. I had nowhere to live and my mam and dad, because of health reasons, had moved into a bungalow after I'd left home. I didn't want them to think I was putting her over them. "

But there were arguments and while visiting a friend Stephen got a text message from his mother telling him not to go back,
Stephen says: "I was gutted and since then I have never really seen her. I don't want to see her. I can understand a mother abandoning her child once because she wasn't mentally or physically capable of looking after him but to abandon him twice is awful and that's what she has done by kicking me out and letting me down a second time.

"I haven't seen her for two years. She wants me to go to her. I don't want to see her but you must try and forgive. Whether you forget it is another thing. I would like to think I had forgiven her and until I feel I have then I won't go. She keeps phoning me up. I will answer to be polite but there's nothing there. I don't want to speak to her."

Does he regret ever going in search of his mother?

"I don't know because I have got the best friendship out of a half brother and my half sister I didn't know about."

Would he advise someone else to do the same?

"Just because I have had some bad experience it doesn't mean someone else is going to. I have always looked at it like a jigsaw with a piece missing. Part of you always wants to know and it was always my mother I wanted to find. I am still as strong as ever with my mam and dad. You get the cards you are dealt with."

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