A man is to be adopted at 32 by his former mother on Friday after being separated for a decade.

Maurice Griffin, a San Francisco native was put up for adoption at the age of 3 and was soon placed in foster parents Charles Harris and Lisa Godbold.

The child fit perfectly with their family, Godbold and her late previous husband Harris was black. The couple agreed to take him in as a foster child and quickly bonded with their sons, Gideon and Spencer. He lived with the family as a foster child for four years.

"Interracial relationships weren't as common or accepted as they are today, and the fact that Maurice was biracial and we were a biracial family made us a great 'profile'," Godbold said.

"We were best friends," Griffin said. "We'd run around, we did mischievous things and fun things. It was a good time."

The family planning to adopt Griffin however was removed by child welfare authorities at the age of 13. He never found a permanent home and longed to return to them.

"I wanted to be treated like a real son," Griffin told KSWB. "Their sons got spanked and I didn't."

At that time he told a social worker that was what was going to happen.

"I told her they were going to be spanking me. She told her superiors and her superiors told her I had to be taken out," he told KSWB.

"You can't spank foster children. Maurice very much wanted that," Godbold said. "We wanted him to feel like the rest of our kids. And there was a difference of opinion with some of the (child welfare) supervisors."

The couple fought fiercely to keep the boy, however were forced to give up as they were threatened that she could lose her biological children too.

Godbold had to let go and Griffin spent the rest of his childhood moving from one foster home to another and never found the same connection with a family again.

"It was just an emptiness," he said. "I couldn't talk to anybody about it because nobody was there. I couldn't call somebody; there was just a void in me."

After the rise of social networking, Griffin saw an opportunity to re-connect with his would-be relatives. However, Godbold's husband died in 1998, and she changed her last name after remarrying, complicating the search.

Then Harris, his former foster mother, six years ago in 2007 made contact and they spoke on the phone for the first time in years.

"She answered the phone and said 'Hi baby.' I held onto her voice for so long," he said. "I told her I had to call her back. I couldn't talk - very emotional for me."

Now the reunited family is heading to a San Diego courtroom Friday to have Griffin legally adopted by Godbold.