A woman who found out she was the product of incest has revealed how it happened, and how it changed the course of her life.
Teresa Weiler was adopted at two and a half by a senior civil servant and his wife in Middlesex, after previously living in a children's home in London, UK.
Talking to OMG Stories: Up Close and OMG Stories on YouTube about her ordeal, Teresa explained that she had been abandoned in West London.
A picture of her was posted on a Catholic weekly notice, and from there her adoptive parents answered the call and took her in, raising her as their own in a family which included two biological sons, and soon after, another adopted girl.
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Raised Catholic, ‘sex before marriage’ was not an acceptable prospect.
However, Teresa would soon find out she was the product of something worse.
At age 18, she explained her adopted father handed her the original birth certificate, which listed her biological mother as Teresa Maureen O’Reilly, but nowhere did it mention her biological father.
A few years later in her 20s, Teresa decided to find out more and visited the social services office to gain access to her files.
As she didn’t want to upset anyone in her family, she didn’t reveal where she was going, but would come to keep another secret from everyone she loved due to her ‘shame’ and ‘revulsion’.
She explained that she found out her mother was 16 when she gave birth, and then, ‘to my shock, I discovered that my father was actually her brother, and he was only 14 at the time'.
Teresa told the cameras: “So basically, my parents were brother and sister.”
“You can imagine I've grown up in a nice Catholic family where sex before marriage is even frowned upon. This was something off the scale and I really did not know what to do with that information,” she admitted, adding she ‘felt sick’.
However, it also explained something to her that she didn’t understand.
Teresa said: “I felt it answered a lot of questions why nobody had wanted me and that that would be why I went into a children's home.
"But most of all, I felt shame because this was a taboo in not just in the Catholic community, but in any community that would be something that people would be appalled by as I was.”
Teresa walked for a long time after reading her file, and came to the conclusion that she would never have children, despite desperately wanting to settle down and have kids like her siblings.
Because of the fear that she ‘could pass on some developmental delay either physically or mentally,’ she instead vowed to be the 'best auntie ever’.
Sadly, her mother did reach out to her via a register for parents wanting to be reunited, and Teresa believes that her father was also in the apartment during the initial meetup, despite her mother claiming him to be ‘a friend’.
Having felt happy to know that she resembled the pair in the room, it was short-lived as she began to fire off questions about her birth and their lives.
She said: "I hadn't realized how angry I felt inside."
Her mother told her to come back when she was 'calmer' and would go on to ghost her, disconnect her phone line, and move home just weeks later, leaving Teresa devastated.
But Teresa has come to accept her origin, and says her nieces and nephews are her ‘joy’.
Britt Jones