Mom Reunited with Daughter Decades After Reluctantly Giving Her Up for Adoption

A mother opened up about the heartbreaking moment she reluctantly gave her 10-week-old daughter up for adoption without even getting to say goodbye and her decades-long attempt to find her before the pair was finally reunited.

During the Wednesday, Sept. 3 special episode of the U.K. television show Long Lost Family: The Mother and Baby Home Scandal, Jean, 85, told her story about the search for her daughter Maria, whom she had to give up for adoption after getting pregnant at 16 in 1956.

Jean was sent to a mother and baby home connected to the Church of England by her parents after she and her boyfriend Tony learned that she was pregnant.

The Home of the Good Shepherd Mother and Baby Home, where Jean was sent, was one of multiple homes in England, along with many in Ireland, designed to provide refuge for unwed mothers.

“Between the 1940s and the 1970s an estimated 200,000 unmarried women were placed in homes, run often by religious [organizations] – and thousands of their babies were taken for adoption. Many of these mothers were teenagers when their babies were taken – usually when their children were about 6 weeks old,” ITV said in a press release obtained by PEOPLE.

Jean said that Tony, who was a year or so older than her, would visit her at the home every weekend.

“My [mom] blamed him for everything, because he was a Catholic, and I didn’t know I was pregnant, because I wasn’t sure how you had a baby. I was terrified, didn’t know what to do,” Jean insisted.

“I can remember Tony saying to me ‘Let me hold her,’ with her blue eyes, little tiny nose, blonde hair…” Jean recalled of her baby daughter.

After Jean gave birth, she and Tony took their then-10-week-old daughter, Maria, to the Southwark Catholic Rescue Society (SCRS) in London, thinking that they had no other option. They first had to baptize her so she could be taken in.

Jean — who went back to the home in Haslemere, Surrey, home location on the show — recalled, “I gave her to this woman who said we’d go and show her off. So I thought she’d bring her back and let us kiss her goodbye, but she didn’t.”

Jean said she wrote to the SCRS when Maria turned 18 to ask for an update, but she didn’t get anything from the organization.

“[They] wrote back and said ‘no’ [and] maybe we’ll be reunited in heaven one day, and I thought that was a horrible thing to say to me,” Jean said.

Jean — whose granddaughter, Caitlin Jones, contacted the show to ask them to help her grandmother find her daughter — said, “After all these years of not being able to find out, I just need an answer. If she doesn’t want to see me, if she’s still alive, that’s okay, because I’ll know then that she’s alright.”

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Jean ended up being reunited with her daughter, who is now called Cathy and lives in Ilford, London.

She had written her daughter a letter, which was read out by Cathy on the episode, in which she said that it would be a “dream come true” to see her daughter, but she would understand if not, as long as she knew she was okay.

“I feel so sorry for what she had to go through – all of that I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,” Cathy told host Nicky Campbell, adding, “My own daughter is unmarried and has a daughter who lives with us and she’s a delight,” per the release.

“I think it was an absolute disgrace the way women were treated in those days and how they were made to feel,” she added.