When Mercy Casanellas took her 18-month-old son to nursery one morning, little Moses started to wail and clung on to stop her leaving.
And when the mum started sobbing too, worried staff rushed over, reassuring her that this was a perfectly normal reaction for a toddler his age.
But Mercy had to explain to them that the tears running down her cheeks were tears of joy.
“When I dropped him off he started to wail and the staff were worried, thinking I’d be upset,” she says.
“I did break down but I said ‘You don’t understand. He’s never cried for me in his life until today. I’m so happy to see it! These are my happy tears.’”
It was the first time her precious boy had shown how much he needed her and that he recognised her loving arms as those of his real mum.
Because hours after he was born in Mercy’s native El Salvador, Moses had been laid in the arms of another mother – as she was handed Mercy’s tot by mistake.
And for three crucial months the women breast-fed and nurtured each others’ son when they should have been bonding with their own.
The baby-swap blunder in May 2015 made headlines around the world after Mercy, then 38, and her British husband Richard Cushworth, 41, realised the boy they had named Jacob wasn’t their flesh and blood.
They had to go to court to force the authorities to search for their own son before being reunited with Moses and handing Jacob to his mum.
That should have been it, says Mercy, who lives in Dallas, Texas, in the US. The happy ending that saw a family reunited, a baby safely back in his mother’s arms. Except Moses didn’t know they were his mother’s arms.
And four years on, Mercy has revealed for the first time how living through every parent’s nightmare left a legacy of worry and despair she feared she would never exorcise.
Traumatically Mercy even found herself mourning Jacob after handing him back to his birth parents then struggled with guilt as Moses failed to respond to her, leaving her feeling like “the worst mum in the world”.
“Those 12 weeks apart had a huge impact on our bonding,” she says.
“Most babies cry when they’re separated from their mums. But that just didn’t happen with Moses.
“It looked like I was a super mum with a boy who’s always smiling, even when his mother walks into another room. But I thought, ‘this isn’t normal’.
“He should be crying when he’s not with me. Then I realised that, for Moses, when I carried him I could have been any of 20 other people.”
It was a heartbreaking realisation. “I was just a care-giver to him, just another person in his life,” she says. Alongside the anguish, there was anger.
“I knew this was all a result of what had happened to Moses the very first day of his life. It’s why I’d drop everything I was doing whenever he cried. I’d hold him as long as he wanted. I took every second to bond that I could.
“But I’d also look at this beautiful boy in my arms and think, ‘You don’t deserve this. You were just an innocent baby. Why did this have to happen?’”
Moses had speech and feeding issues, which therapists explained were a consequence of that early separation. And then, even when he did begin talking, he didn’t call Mercy “mama”.
“I would see other kids calling for their mums and I would cry,” she says.
“Moses would refer to me indirectly. He’d say ‘mama has my shoes’. But he’d never call ‘mama’ like other children.”
Finally, at 18 months, there was that nursery breakthrough.
And then came the day when Moses finally called her “mama”. He was three years old and it was Mother’s Day. “It was the best gift I’ve ever had,” she says.
Mercy still has so many questions. How did the boys become switched, and why? What did Moses experience in those months?
“Not knowing is still incredibly painful,” she says.
“The hardest part is accepting that I may never know what happened to Moses in his 12 lost weeks.
“And the things we’ve missed as mother and baby, I’ll never get them back. Those first feeds and nights together, dressing him at one week
or one month old, the precious pictures.
“I still look at babies that age and think ‘is that how my baby was?
“All the money in the world won’t give those moments back to us.”
The experience has left Mercy with a legacy of anxiety.
“Richard is amazing with Moses, so calm and loving,” she says.
“But even when it’s him taking Moses to the shops I say ‘make sure that he’s with you, holding your hand, or safely in the trolley. The fear is still there, the innocence of seeing the world as safe has gone for me.”
Mercy and Richard, who have an older son Kenji, 18, had been working as missionaries in El Salvador when she fell pregnant with their second child.
“At my regular 35-week appointment the doctor suddenly said ‘this baby is going to be born today’.
“Richard had flown to America a few days earlier and I was desperate for him to be there.
“My heart was racing when they got the baby out. I was worried if he was going to make it?
“But I was so relieved when I finally saw his beautiful face. I thought, ‘wow, he looks exactly like Richard’.
“He was small though so they whisked him away. I was exhausted – ‘too nervous’ the doctor said – and they put a mask on my face and I was immediately asleep.”
Waking to the sound of cots being wheeled into the room, Mercy couldn’t wait to hold her son again.
But she says: “When they put him in the bed next to me all I thought was ‘he doesn’t look like the baby I saw last night’. It was such a strange feeling.
“Here was this lovely baby, but something was just wrong.”
For the next four days, as Mercy breast-fed and cuddled the little boy she’d named Jacob, that feeling remained.
When Kenji was born she had felt an instant connection. This time that bond was missing.
She mentioned it to the nurses and finally approached one of the doctors who delivered Moses.
“I said, ‘This baby doesn’t look like the one I saw at the birth. Might there have been a mix-up?’
“She said ‘No, this is absolutely your baby’. I thought, “Well, they’re professionals They must be right.”
Richard, originally from Bradford, West Yorks, was instantly besotted with Jacob.
But as Jacob began to grow Mercy’s doubts started eating away at her and she decided she had to be sure.
She recalls: “I drove to the hospital for a DNA test. It was such a horrendous experience. I felt like I was betraying my beautiful baby.”
A month later a friend went to collect the results from the hospital.
“She rang me and was so calm on the phone but she said ‘There is no chance that he is your baby’.
“My legs gave way. Richard found me on the floor crying hours later, and I told him everything.
“He immediately leapt into action. ‘We’re buying plane tickets’,” he said. ‘We’re leaving right now.’
“All the time I was thinking ‘What is going to happen with Jacob? I can’t live without him. Where is my other baby? How are we ever going to find him?’”
At the district attorney’s office in El Salvador a team were put on the case and suspicion fell on their obstetrician, who was accused of masterminding a plot to sell their son to traffickers.
Mercy recalls: “A few days later they told us, ‘We have good news and bad. Everything points to the fact that you are victims of human trafficking. The bad news is that you’ll never find your child again, he’s gone. The good news is that Jacob is an abandoned baby. That means you can keep him for ever’.
“To hear the words, ‘You’re never going to see your son again’ – it’s incomprehensible. But inside I knew they were wrong. I felt that God was telling me that we’d be reunited.”
Their obstetrician was arrested but then freed. Then, after weeks of searching and waiting, Mercy and Richard were called into the judge’s office. “By this point I was numb from exhaustion, sitting there blankly,” she says.
“But suddenly the judge was telling me a new story.
“We hadn’t been a victim of human trafficking – there had been a mix-up at the hospital. Then I heard the words ‘We’ve found your baby’.
“Waves of shock and relief, confusion and absolute happiness washed over me.
“But there was a terrible blow to come. Because then we heard him ask ‘Where is the other baby? If you don’t bring the child here,
I’m not going to give you yours’. He was talking about Jacob. We were expected to give him up, and right away.
“It was the best and worst day of my life, like a new life and a sudden death all at once. I started to scream – because Jacob was my baby, too.”
“Packing up his things and driving to the office was agony.
“I held him tightly in my arms as we walked through the door and then I saw a woman holding a baby.
“It was my son. I kissed Jacob goodbye as I handed him across. And then my son was passed to me.”
Through the tears and sadness it’s a moment she will never forget. “He opened his eyes, looked at me and began to laugh,” she says. “He looked exactly like Richard, even wearing the same colour shirt. I felt bonded immediately – it was like a dream come true.
“I felt complete, like a piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Every hair on his head was beautiful. The moment I should have had when he was born – I was having it now. It was like falling in love. All the fighting had been worth it, our son was back where he belonged.”
Mercy and Richard haven’t kept Moses’s extraordinary start in life a secret from him.
In fact, it’s a story they love to share.
“We tell him, ‘we love you, we fought for you and we’re so happy to have you back’,” his mum says.
“You were lost and then you were found. And we’ll never lose you again.”
