We all love a good love story — especially if the way that the couple met was interesting. But one mom from Seattle has a romantic tale that beats any rom-com. Jessica Share and her ex-wife had two daughters in the early 2000s using a sperm donor. But now, years after the couple has split, Share has met and is dating her girl's donor dad in a modern-day romance story that proves love finds us where we least expect it.
As the mom explains, she and her ex-wife had always known they wanted to have kids, but they knew they needed a sperm donor to make it happen.
Speaking with CafeMom, Share says that she and her ex had decided to use the same sperm donor when they had both of their children — Alice in June 2005 and Soren in February 2007.
"My wife and I wanted to get pregnant for as long as we remember," Share says. "We would name our hypothetical kids back in grad school and always planned to have a family. We decided on a sperm donor because I'd taken a 'sexuality and the law' class and it was terrifying. I wanted safety for our children to stay with the parents who were raising them."
Unfortunately, Share and her wife decided to split and 10 years after their breakup, she says her ex "cut off all contact with Alice and withheld Soren." The situation was difficult and heartbreaking.
"Both girls have lost an entire half of their family, and Soren's lost her primary parent," Share adds. "The girls lost each other and aren't allowed contact. My ex won't speak to her daughter and we can't find anyone who will help us save Soren. It's an ongoing (expletive)."
Share says her daughter Alice wanted to do a DNA test to meet her biological father shortly after her other mother left. Knowing how much her daughter had lost, Share decided that it would be okay. "I knew she was very clear on some pretty mature issues: how DNA is different from love, what a parent is and does and what she'd expect from Aaron (the man she'd later discover to be her biological dad) and who he would be in her life," Share explains.
Alice had seen ancestry charts from DNA testing services such as 23andMe and "wanted to see her own." Her grandmother had done it and "happy obliged" to help her make it happen.
Share never expected that they would actually find anyone through her daughter's DNA test, but lo and behold they received an answer.
"The first thing we saw when we got the results back was 'Aaron Long: father 50 percent shared DNA,'" the mom says. "And then underneath that, a 25 percent half-brother."
Shocked, the mom feared that the service alerted users when a new family member had been found (she later learned it does not) and worried that Long now knew that he had another child. "Now the clock is ticking and we're not contacting him and how long passes before that becomes awkward?" she says.
Share says she did "a lot" of online research before contacting Long. Once she found the person who was related to her daughter, she sent him a note saying "we were available to trade pictures if he wanted."
It turned out that Long had been in touch with two of his other donor children and both of them were making a trip to visit him for the first time in July 2017. Long doesn't live too far from Share and her daughter, so they decided to wait and visit him with the other donor kids so they could meet everybody at once.
Long called the meeting a "Meet My Kids" party "because he'd never had a wedding or kids and thought it was a good excuse to have a big party and invite his friends and share this with them," Share recalls.
But something else happened when Share and Long met that nobody ever expected.
At the party, "(Long) had flirted with me a little bit but I brushed him off," Share tells CafeMom. "I was very hesitant because this is my children's person and he needs to be in their lives." Share says she even worried about what would happen if the two broke up. "I am not willing to muck up that relationship for the kids and for their kids," she says. "I held off until I knew him and trusted him well enough to feel safe about a breakup."
Share adds that she even spoke with several of Long's ex-girlfriends who had also gone to the Meet My Kids party, which made her feel a little bit better about taking the risk. "It is backward and strange to have to envision your breakup and know it's going to go well before even agreeing to go out for coffee with someone. But yeah, that trust had to be there for me."
The parents are now officially a couple and the unique family even lives together with another one of Long's donor kids.
In total, Long has 10 donor children that he knows of and has met four of them. But only Alice and his daughter Madalyn, 21, live in the house with him. "She moved out here from Virginia to explore Seattle and get to know Aaron and this side of her family," Share says.
Share says her daughter "had no concerns" about her mother and her biological dad becoming a couple. "She still shrugs off the entire thing. She thinks of Aaron as an acquaintance and she's very interested in people knowing that her sister (Soren) is her true family." Alice knows that Long "is not going to be a 'replacement' anything for her at this age," she says.
"Alice and Aaron have a lot in common, but Alice is old enough that she's not running up to new beaus and calling them daddy, even if in this case he is!" Share jokes. "She thinks it's mind-boggling that so many people find it interesting."
Share says she and Long have no plans to have any more children together and says their friends and family have been nothing but supportive of their relationship.
"We didn't expect there to be such a reception to the story from people we don't know," Share adds. "But everyone we talk to has a DNA story, or an adoption (story), or is starting their family in a unique way they want to tell us about, so I think as unique as it has been it's also sort of universal."
And for Share, she believes her relationship can only bring good things into their lives. "Everyone wants more love in their lives and more people on their side and to know where they come from and where they belong," she says. "That's the lesson here: Being open to people and love is never a mistake."
