Losing my boy almost destroyed me. Finding him again made my life WORSE

Philippa Hornsey's son Tony, aged 12, on holiday. She never got over the pain of giving him up for adoption

The toxic mixture of fear, guilt and excitement was like nothing Philippa Hornsey had ever experienced before.
As she sat outside the pub, scanning the faces of every young man filing past her table, Philippa realised this was something very few women ever experience in life. She was a member of a very exclusive — and unenviable — club.
She was waiting to meet her son Tony — the son she hadn’t seen since she was forced to give him up for adoption 23 years earlier when she was still a teenager.
Her last sight of him was as a tiny, bundled-up newborn in his hospital basinet. She’d managed to ‘steal’ a few minutes alone with him, against social workers’ advice, before he was quietly spirited away to an unknown couple and an unknown future.
But now he was back. She recognised the slim, blond, blue-eyed young man,  striding past her table, straightaway — he looked so much like her — and felt a shiver of pride and pain.
‘I would have known him anywhere,’ says Philippa, now 50. ‘My first instinct was to  rush up to him, take him in my arms and tell him I was sorry I’d given him away. But I felt so scared.’
This is the point in the story at which any scriptwriter would start preparing for a big, happy ending, with tears and hugs as mother and son are finally reunited, undoing more than two decades of pain. And, initially, Philippa and Tony played their parts perfectly.
But the happy ending soon led to another even more painful chapter in their story, which placed an almost unbearable strain on Philippa’s marriage, and led to a bitter falling-out between her and her son.
So bad are relations between them that now, despite the 23 years they spent longing for a reunion, Philippa and Tony haven’t spoken in three years.