A few days before Anne McDermott’s mother died, she took Anne aside to reveal a puzzling prediction about Anne’s husband, Peter.

“(She) took my hand and said, ‘Annie, I just want you to know that not everything is as it seems with Peter and his family.'”

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Anne had always thought her mother was psychic, but at the time she dismissed it.

But the message would stay with her.

The coffee date with a question

A few years later, Anne’s sister-in-law, Kerry, invited her to go to the movies and have a cup of coffee.

It was an innocent conversation, but Anne had something on her mind that day.

“I thought about Mom for a while that day,” Anne said.

“And suddenly that question popped into my head.”

Over a cup of coffee, Anne asked if her husband Peter was adopted.

Kerry’s silence spoke volumes.

Anne was initially furious about the news.

A few years earlier, Anne and Peter had asked all family members about their medical history after their son, who had autism, became seriously ill.

“They told me the whole family history, but it was totally irrelevant,” Anne said.

“We asked because we had already lost a child and we needed to know the story in order to save our other child.”

The deadline

After the anger subsided, Anne realized she now had life-changing information.

“I said, ‘They have until Friday to tell him (Peter) themselves. I’m not going to say anything.'”

A few days later, Peter’s parents came to his home and told him the shocking news.

“Right on point – they were always right on point,” Peter recalls.

Peter hugged his parents and told them he loved them.

The truth, a lawyer and a mysterious letter

Peter’s parents had little information about his birth.

The adoption was done through a lawyer who had passed away and all his records were lost.

That’s why Peter decided to contact an organization that helped adopted people find out their birth details.

Five days after the request for information was sent, a letter arrived.

It was addressed to “Peter John Hanney”.

Peter knew himself only as Peter John McDermott his entire life.

Inside the bag was his original birth certificate and just in front of him were the first and last names of his biological mother, Edie Hanney.

When he later told his boss Jamie the news, a shocking memory came back to him.

“(Jamie) said, ‘I’m sure (The Hanney’s) owned the bakery in Dunsborough many years ago. I’ll check with my neighbour, an 80-year veteran of Dunsborough.'”

The next day, Jamie came by with a list of the names and phone numbers of his biological mother’s relatives.

“We were absolutely blown away,” Anne said.

Capel, 210 kilometres south of Perth, where Anne and Peter moved more than 30 years ago, was a 40-minute drive from where Peter’s biological mother lived.

“I was just overwhelmed,” Peter said.

Peter couldn’t bring himself to call, so Anne stepped in.

“I thought I just wanted to figure this out and solve this… this problem and work it out,” she said.

So she called Edie’s brother.

“I said, ‘Oh, hello, my name is Anne McDermott, we live in Capel. I’m going to ask you a very difficult question because my husband is adopted.’

“He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I could hear it right away in his voice and the way he answered.

The brother called back the next day, after speaking to his sister Edie, and told Anne she wanted to speak to Peter.

A phone call was arranged and Peter was finally able to speak to his biological mother.

“The first thing he did was burst into tears. He was emotionally distraught,” Anne recalls.

“So we had to calm him down.

“She was an emotional mess. So they were just crying emotionally with each other, talking to each other about nothing.”

Eventually the subject of his adoption came up.

“His biological mother said that at 18, she did her best to raise him. She didn’t want to give up on him,” Anne recalled.

Edie married Peter out of wedlock in 1958 and did not know his father.

The shame became too great for the family.

After two months she was asked to give him up.

“(Thanks to) (Edie’s) father, who let her keep the baby for two months to see how it would go,” Anne recalls.

After the phone call, Peter was eager to meet his biological mother.

“I walked straight up to Edie and it was like looking in a mirror,” Peter recalls.

“Absolute (second-hand) spitting image. Except she had hair,” he laughed.

When Peter and Edie first met in 2018, she gave him a gift.

There were two folders with 25 poems each.

“Every year on my birthday she wrote a poem,” Peter said.

“She was so traumatized.”

But it was a trauma that helped Edie cope with the other difficult times in her life.

“She said that whenever she had a hard time in her life, she would always fall back on Peter and hold him like a two-month-old baby,” Anne recalls.

“(She thought) giving him up was the worst thing she could ever do, so what I’m going through now is nothing.”

Shocking adoption stories not uncommon

Kaila DeCinque is a counselor at Adoption Research and Counselling Service in Western Australia.

She said that stories like Peter’s were very common.

“We see a lot of clients who don’t find out they were adopted until they’re in their 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s,” she says.

“Adoption has far-reaching consequences for the family.

“Your siblings may also feel betrayed by your adoptive parents. Perhaps they are 15 years older and knew about the adoption and felt they had to keep it a secret.”

Ms DeCinque said families are increasingly faced with shocking discoveries about adoption as more research is done into their ancestry.

Edie passed away in 2018, five years after she was reunited with Peter.

But Peter said he was grateful for the time they had.

“I’ve never been angry because I’ve had a good life,” he said.

Peter also met his three half-brothers, a big change in his life after growing up with one sister.

It was a life-changing experience, but one that almost never came to light.

“If my mother hadn’t said what she said, this would never have happened,” Anne said.

“We would probably have fallen into our graves (without knowing it).”

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