MOLLIE was 16 when she became pregnant, 33 years ago.
At the time it was "worse than murder" for a single girl to be pregnant, she said. She saw no choice but to have her baby adopted.
Mollie (not her real name), herself fostered, has found her birth mother and her daughter.
Her foster mother "was nearly 70 when she got me, herself and her son. She was good to me but you couldn't look on her as a mother. When I was young I used to go to bed crying for my mother".
At 16 when, she says, "I was young and I was innocent", she became pregnant by a man in his 20s. The question of marriage never arose.
Her foster mother would have cared for her baby but was in her 80s at this stage.
"I stayed at home that time for the nine months. I never went to a doctor. I was in complete shock, I suppose. I Just wanted to throw myself into the river."
She was sent to the Sacred Heart sisters in Cork to have her baby. "They were very good while I was there, I must say that."
She cannot say the same for the child welfare officer who, she thinks, worked for the health authorities. "The day she took the baby I was crying mad. She said, What the hell are you crying for? My baby was eight months old."
Giving up her daughter was a very hard thing to do. "I took it very bad. I couldn't talk about it for a long, long time." Within 10 years, she had begun the search to find out what had become of her daughter.
First, a priest helped her to find her own mother who had married in England.
"It must have been very bad for her," she says of the 1940s, when her mother was pregnant with her. "Her father wouldn't allow her home with the baby. The first time I went over to see her she told her family I was a niece".
But now she says her mother no longer conceals their relationship. "She says this is my daughter from Ireland.
Her search for her own daughter took 25 years. "I got no help at all. Only for my own determination for 25 years I would have got nowhere."
Unknown to her, her daughter Maura had been searching for her for 10 years and getting nowhere. The breakthrough came when a letter, written by Maura five years earlier, was found in the Southern Health Board office in Tralee. It was found by social worker Veronica Carey who, Mollie says, was of enormous help.
Mollie had always thought her daughter had been adopted in Ireland. Now she discovered that the child had been adopted in the United States and had spent 21/2 years in a mother and baby home in Castlepollard, Co Westmeath.
"To think she was up there for almost two years and I didn't know it. It's shocking to think she was there." Mollie now has a video made from a home movie of her daughter's arrival in the United States.
The couple who adopted Maura were told that she had been abandoned, a slur which still hurts Mollie today. The meeting with Maura last year "was hard", she says. "She was from a different culture altogether. She was pure American. It was much harder than if she was Irish."
Mollie has six children in Ireland and they have given her "great support". When Maura came to Ireland, "they got on very well with her and everything", she says. "They were very pleased."
Maura rang her on her 32nd birthday and has invited her and her daughter in Ireland to go to her graduation in January, a trip she would like to make if she can afford it.