Jessica Share thought her life was complete.

After marrying her partner, the newlyweds excitedly welcomed the arrival of their baby, seeing her become “the first lesbian parent I had ever met”.

Along with her wife, the two had mapped out their lives together even going as far to decide on the names of the four children they hoped to have through a sperm donor.

However, Jessica’s dreams were left shattered when five years later, in 2010, without warning – and despite her partner having their second daughter – her marriage collapsed.

Resigned to bringing up the girls as a lone parent, finding true happiness again proved difficult.

But then in 2017, Jessica, 42, finally met her boyfriend – 12 years after giving birth to his child.

And now, the mum-of-one along with sperm donor Aaron Long have moved in together making a happy home for Alice along with several of the kids he has fathered throughout his life.

Jessica never expected to meet Alice’s sperm donor, never mind date and move in with him.

“I felt like I had been watching him for over a decade,” she said.

“I had these threads of him. This wasn’t what made the bond, but it certainly made him very familiar to me because he right away looked and acted like people I had known and loved for a decade.”

Before meeting Aaron, Jessica, who lived in Oregon and works in marketing, simply knew her daughter’s father as Donor No. 2008 at the Fairfax Cryobank.

Unbeknown to her he had signed up to give sperm after returning to the States from a year teaching English abroad.

“One day I saw a newspaper ad seeking healthy men, 18 to 35, to participate in a semen donation program, he explained.

“‘Donors’ is the standard industry word, yet virtually all of us are paid. Forty dollars (£32) a pop was what I received in 1994.

“I applied to sell my sperm and sold twice weekly for a year. At the time I was in a long-distance relationship, so this seemed like a good outlet. When I told my mother, she presciently wondered aloud if this was the only way she was going to have grandchildren.”

When deciding on whose sperm to choose Jessica and her then-wife looked for qualities that existed between them including a passion for literature and sports.

“The donor listed his profession as a writer, musician, and taxi driver” she recalled.

“My wife and I romantically imagined he was refusing to get a desk job, but instead collecting the stories of those he’d pick up in his cab, readying to write the Great American Novel,” Jessica explained.

After trying to get pregnant for seven months, the couple finally received the news they had longed for.

“I was pregnant with our first child and my wife, and I were overjoyed.”

We gave hardly a thought to the donor that we assumed we would never meet. My wife was particularly hostile to the idea of ever letting our children know him – she felt that love made a family, and I agreed.”

She added: “When Alice was born, she was perfect.”

And 18 months later, the couple welcomed their second daughter, again using Aaron’s sperm.

Jessica added: “Both girls shared plenty of traits. Knowing how my wife and I looked as children, it became a fun pastime to pick out the characteristics only the girls shared: they were both extraordinarily tall, not average height, as the donor claimed to be.

"Both had long, thin mouths, small noses, electric eyes that look like emeralds underwater, and impeccable vocabularies.”

But when the girls were three and one years old, Jessica’s world fell apart when her wife left. For seven years she brought the children up during the week, but when Alice was ten, she says her wife cut off their eldest child entirely.

More heartache was to follow when her youngest daughter failed to be returned from a holiday. Jessica has failed to see her ever since.

Jessica told the BBC: “Alice spends her days dreaming of the sister she was raised with and who she is afraid she will never see again.

"Alice knows more deeply than most children that family is neither genetically created nor forged through parenting alone. Parenting did not make her mama stay.

“And although genetics was a small piece of what her family looked like for a decade, that also seemed like an unimportant part of who she was.

“However, Alice wondered where her ancestors came from. My mother had often told stories about the family’s Cornish heritage to anyone who would listen. Wanting to know what her genetic heritage was, Alice requested a DNA testing kit from her grandmother for Christmas when she was 11 years old.”

Curious to find her birth father, she was a bought 23andMe test.

The results came back about eight weeks later showing an “Aaron Long” to be a 50% match as the father.

Through her own detective work and the use of social media, Jessica found a man she thought matched her donor’s description.

She said photos of him when he was at school matched the “stupid face” her Alice makes. Jessica then penned him a note and they began talking.

“We agreed to become friends on a social networking site, and Aaron sent a 50-page long life history, which I devoured.

"He’d spent several years in a band in the town where we lived. How many times had we walked past him in the supermarket, I wondered?”

For the next five months, the two continued to exchange messages.

Then in July 2017, Aaron, 52, who in the early 2000s had searched for a way to find his children, invited all of the biological children he had connected with to a “Meet My Kids Party” in Seattle.

When they met in person, Jessica was struck by how familiar he already seemed. So many of his mannerisms were similar to their daughter’s.

Weeks after meeting Aaron, Jessica and Alice were having trouble with their landlord in Oregon.

A place opened up in Aaron’s building, a communal living apartment blocks, and given how close he was growing with Jessica, he suggested they move in for a few months.

The pair got on so well they began dating and now live together, with Alice.

Last May, another biological daughter of Aaron’s, who is 21, joined them from Virginia.

She added: “Who knows how many more of Aaron’s bio-kids there are – he’s estimated there could be as many as 67. The building may eventually cease to accommodate all of them, but I’ve got the sandwiches, and the door’s open.”

Everyone in the family is quick to acknowledge that while they live together, Aaron is not a father figure to Alice – especially Alice herself.

While she says the two are “chill” together, the teen sees him more as her mother’s boyfriend than anything else.

“We’re definitely not a family. This is not the nuclear ‘Brady Bunch’ thing,” Alice said

“You can’t just adopt someone as your dad, despite what chick flicks say.”

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