Baby Mary has found her birth family.
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Baby Mary
January 19, 2020 - 3:47 PM
Teanna Elliot's online supporters heard the news they’ve been waiting for this week.
The young woman who started her life making national news as “Baby Mary," solved a mystery 32 years in the making.
She announced on a live Facebook video she’d made contact with the woman who secretly gave birth to her Nov. 25, 1987 and left her behind in a Calgary parking lot wrapped in a garbage bag, still attached to her umbilical cord.
“We email a lot but she’s still processing,” Elliot said on a Facebook post.
Baby Mary has found her birth mother.
Image Credit: FACEBOOK/BABY MARY
“We are slowly building a relationship.”
Elliot said it’s a difficult situation and she understands her birth mother’s tentativeness. She was very young when she gave birth and never told a soul about what happened.
Elliot, however, has been very forthright about her needs, speaking to media outlets in recent years in an attempt to find the woman who left her behind.
Now that they’ve made contact Elliot said she wanted to be clear that she holds no ill will toward the woman who abandoned her. And to all of those who have asked her over the years whether she would support Crown counsel pursuing criminal charges, “that’s a solid no,” she said.
“I think she’s lived with this for 32 years and I think this is punishment enough. I would just like to have a relationship with her.”
It’s a decision her parents support.
“My mom and dad are super happy for me. This something they’ve wanted this for me for a long time. I never wanted to replace them, she said.
Elliot's parents, Mike and Teresa Guzzi, learned about "Baby Mary" like everyone else in November 1987.
The difference in their case was that Teresa saw something else—the missing piece of their family, Elliot said in an earlier interview.
“My mother had already had my brother, but they wanted another baby,” said Elliot, explaining that because of a recent cancer battle it would be challenging.
“They were on an adoption list, and when they were watching the news that morning, my mom said, ‘oh my gosh, Mike, I want this baby.’”
Mike tried to discourage her, thinking it was a long shot, but she persisted and contacted a social worker.
It took nine days until the Guzzis took Elliot home.
At first she was their foster baby, then six months later they were given permission to adopt.
“My parents shaped me, and they made me who I am,” said Elliot. “They are so supportive. I know a lot of people say, ‘you should be grateful for your adoptive parents.’
But they’re not my adoptive parents, they are my mom and dad.”
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