Ingrid O'Brien has only seen her daughter Frances a handful of times over the last four years. Before that, 30-odd years had passed since she last saw Frances, who was just over a week old.

Ingrid was in her teens and still at boarding school when she found out she was pregnant. Like many young girls in her situation in the 1960s, she was sent to a Good Shepherd's home and subsequently Frances was put up for adoption. Frances was raised in Ireland, but now lives in America. It took her 15 years to track down her birth mother and in February 1997 Ingrid got a phone call from a social worker saying her daughter wanted to contact her.

They met that autumn, in a hotel. "It must be the most scary thing I have ever done in my life," admits Ingrid.

She had rehearsed a little speech she was going to give when they met. "The moment I saw her I wasn't immediately struck by how like me she was - even though she is so extremely like me, so I should have been. I kept crying and kept on telling her she was a topper. My eloquent speech went out the window and all I could say was 'you're a topper, you're a topper'." In between the tears, Ingrid tried to thank Frances for having the strength to find her. "I was trying to tell her how much I admired that strength and how I loved her. There were so many things I was trying to say and 'you're a topper' was all that came out." They spent about three hours together and Ingrid kept on staring at Frances' hands, as they were so like her own. "They were my hands on another human being and I had never experienced that before. And I just couldn't get over it. Her face was my face but I wasn't as conscious of it because her hair is not like mine." Ingrid's family knew she had a daughter but it was never mentioned.

Breaking the news to her second child Eoghan, who recently turned 21, was not as straightforward. Eoghan has Down's Syndrome and as an only child does not understand sibling relationships. He does not see Frances as a sister, just someone he sees every six months or so.

Birth mother and daughter now communicate regularly by e-mail and phone, but there is still a secretive element to their relationship. At Ingrid's request, her daughter's real name has not been used for this article; Frances's adoptive mother does not know she has found Ingrid.

Frances believes her mother wouldn't be able to cope with it.

Ingrid believes the mother has a right to know; they share the same daughter and the same grandchildren. She is not threatening the relationship between Frances and her mother. "She will always be her mother," says Ingrid.

Ingrid is gathering stories together for a forthcoming book on the experiences of birth mothers around adoption, and in the book would like to highlight the point that birth mothers are not there to threaten relationships.

"The idea of the book came about because a number of us, a number of birth parents, decided that we needed to know as much as we could about adoption in general from everybody, before we met our children, so that we wouldn't make mistakes."

However, the only material they found was written about the American, New Zealand and British experience of adoption; none was of the Irish experience.

"Although the experience of giving birth is a pretty international one, the experience of adoption and the stigma, in our time, of illegitimacy, was going to vary from country to country according to the religious practices, according to the society."

The aim of the book is to inform people that they are not alone, says Ingrid, and "that we weren't all bad people who chose to give our children away but that we were women who were dropped by the society of our time and the circumstances of our pregnancy. Most of the time the only choice we had was what was best for our children." A publisher for the book is being sought.