MOORPARK : Woman, Biological Mother Reunited After 31 Years

A Moorpark woman was reunited at a television show studio Friday with the mother who gave her up for adoption 31 years ago.

With nearly 40 friends and relatives in the audience, Peggy Stavropoulos, who will turn 31 Monday, met her birth mother, Pam Karbowski, for the first time on the “Home” show in Los Angeles.

Also on the program was Ray Gonsalves, the father who, until Stavropoulos telephoned him two months ago, never knew that a high school romance with Karbowski had produced a daughter.

“I think I’m still overwhelmed,” Stavropoulos said Friday afternoon. “It’s over. We’ve all met and I think we’ll all share a love with each other for years to come.”

About three months before her high school graduation, and already pregnant, Karbowski had broken off a two-year relationship with Gonsalves and moved away when her father was transferred. She never told Gonsalves about the child, whom she gave up for adoption immediately after delivery.

With the support of her adoptive mother, Madge Lynch of Moorpark, Stavropoulos started looking for her biological parents about seven years ago, when she was pregnant with the first of her three children.

“We are very secure in our relationship and we love each other,” Lynch said Friday. “Nobody can take these 31 years away.”

But Stavropoulos’ search had been fruitless until a friend suggested that they go to a taping of the “Home” show in March, which had scheduled a segment on a child who had found her biological parents. After the show, the professional searcher who had aided the woman offered to help Stavropoulos.

“Within a month, she called with the names,” she said.

They found Gonsalves in the Santa Rosa Valley. With his help, Stavropoulos located Karbowski’s father, who led them to his daughter in Omaha.

A month ago, already having visited her father, Stavropoulos phoned her biological mother.

“I said, ‘My name won’t be familiar to you, but you do know me.’ She said, ‘I do?’ ” Stavropoulos said. “I said, ‘Does the date Oct. 12, 1961, mean anything to you?’ And then she just kind of lost it.”

“I started crying and just completely came apart,” Karbowski said, her voice still choked with emotion. “I had been waiting for so many years for a knock on the door or a phone call.”

The two exchanged calls and letters in the past month before Karbowski walked into a flood of studio lights to meet the child she wondered if she’d ever see again.

“It was the most emotional thing that’s happened to me in my life,” she said.