YEAR 2003


The mobile mobile rang with a shrill. She looked at the caller ID and gazed out of the window into the miserable, murky January morning.
'Is that you Amelie?'

She Immediately recognised that something was up. It was in Amelie's voice.

'Mum, could you have me and Robert for five days?'

Wow... she was coming visiting her in Scotland! What a nice surprise.
'Yes, of course, Darling, just say when.'
Seven days later they were there and that was to be the start of an adventurous 2003.

A year that would forever change her life.

A week later, after some very pleasant days with her daughter and her boyfriend, she decided to go to Denmark to visit her old, but very spry aunt..They arranged for the start of March and she was really looking forward to seeing her. They had always been very close. Her aunt was much more like a real mother, rather than the mother she had grown up with. Whether it had anything to do with the fact that she was adopted she would never know, Her adopted mother was long dead. She couldn't ask her adopted father either, with whom she had been very close. He died when she was only a teenager, and she had missed him ever since.

She then realised that she still had quite a lot of holiday due, and in a flush moment she arranged to travel to Missouri, USA, to visit her very dear friends, whom she'd known for over thirty years. They were very excited, and had invited her to stay as long as she could. Oh, she was so looking forward to the four weeks to see them all. That settled, she could now look forward to a very busy time....Little could she have imagined just how busy it would turn out to be.

It soon became the time to go to Denmark and as arranged she stayed with her aunt. However, it was obvious that her aunt had an agenda. For the umpteenth time, her aunt told her that if she was ever to find her biological mother she'd better get on with it, and that this was really the time for her to do so. Her aunt was quite stern, so to keep the peace, the very next day they had both gone to the hospital where she had been born.

There, to her surprise, she got all the details of her real mother as they had been at the time of her birth almost fifty two years ago. She had felt really excited.
But from then, she was on her own to find out what had become of her mother
during the last fifty years or so.

As it turned out, she had been in luck, getting a lot of help from a total unexpected angle. Suffice to say that friends, who were in the right position at the right time, managed to get the information she needed and the Internet did the rest of the work.

In little more than a month she not only discovered who her mother was, she also learned that her mother was alive and where she lived! In California no less!

Well, did she believe in omens? Maybe, but the reality of it was that she had arranged to visit her friends in The United States, which now gave her the chance to travel to California, to look up her mum! Even meeting her! And that, she decided, was exactly what she was going to do.

And so it was that one lovely day in May she stood on her mother's doorstep.
She remembered how she had been taken into the house and after much talk and some crying, they had decided to give it a go. She stayed four magical days, which had been the start of what had grown into a wonderful relationship with her real mother.

Before long she was back in Scotland, only to meet Sean, her future husband.

They had discovered the love they both had of sailing. Sean, an early retiree and divorced, had decided to sail his boat down to The Mediterranean, and on the spur of the moment had invited her to come along for some weeks. Daringly, she agreed, and they just hit it off. They'd ended up somewhere on the Northern Spanish coast.

So the end of 2003 saw her not only reconciled with her Daughter, finding her real mother, but also starting a whole new life!

It had indeed been a year of turbulence......