It took me three years to read your letter. Back in 2018, when I didn’t really understand the process, I thought ‘pen sketch’ meant an artist’s drawing of the sperm donor. I didn’t look at it as I didn’t want to see you. Not then. I didn’t want to choose a donor based on looks and I didn’t want to identify a stranger on the faces of my prospective children. Later, when I joined groups for donor assisted families, I discovered – by chance when reading a Facebook post – that the so called ‘pen sketch’ was not a picture, it was a letter.

I was worried then. A letter seemed so much more significant than a picture. I had folders of data and information on you: geographical data, medical data, a list of your accomplishments but not your voice, not your words.

I knew that when my children turned eighteen, they would be able to access your contact information and I believed then, and only then, would I learn about who you are as a person. But then I discovered that in a folder I marked as ‘DONORINFO’ was a letter from you, and it had languished there for three years.

I was panicked and fretted about what might be written. I grabbed my laptop and searched the documents for ‘Pen Sketch’. I struggled to find it because I had saved it as ‘Picture.’ When I found it, I clicked it several times with little staccato jabs of my trembling finger.

It was noon on a Saturday and my children were playing in their room. As they played, you told me about your hometown, family, and upbringing. So much had been redacted and that made me smile – you included so much identifying information and shared so much of yourself that someone at the sperm bank needed to scrub away lines and words with a black marker. I, too, am an oversharer.

It must have been such a strange practice, to write to a future family created from your own genetic material that may or may not exist. Do you wonder about them? The families who would read this? Do you have hopes and aspirations for the children who would be born from your donation?

What would I write?

What would I say to you in reply?

What would be in my pen sketch?

You wrote, “I was born and grew up in . I enjoyed an idyllic childhood in a country town.”

I was born in 1983, in what Joseph Conrad called “the wilds of Essex.” My whole family are from a little village called Stanford-le-Hope in Essex, southeast of England, just outside London. ‘Stanford’ comes from the Saxon for Stone Ford and ‘le Hope’ refers to the River Hope that runs through it. I live near the local Nature Reserve and often take my children up to the observatory there where they play in the park, and we watch the boats leave the estuary for the River Thames. If you stand on the seawall and look left, you can see the refinery my father and grandfather worked at as welders. Turn 90 degrees, and you’ll face several large farming fields; if you wave, my aunt, in her garden, might wave back.

The Nature Reserve is a site of archaeological interest with excavations of pottery fragments demonstrating human habitation from over two thousand years ago. I found shards of pottery in my garden in 2017 when I was digging a six-foot hole for a pond. As I turned the fragments over in my hands, I remembered how my grandmother would scatter pot fragments and eggshells around her plants and vegetables to stop slugs. I wondered if the pottery was from that sort of practice or whether the fragments were thousands of years old and once cooked food over a fire for a family at Stone Ford.

It is local urban legend that Stanford inherited ‘le Hope’ from the legacy of Captain George Fountaine Weare Hope – friend to Joseph Conrad. In reality, Captain Hope and his wife moved to Stanford (already named Stanford-le-Hope) in 1902 bringing their friend Joseph Conrad with them shortly thereafter. The writer lived with the Hopes in a road adjacent to (what would become) my grandmother’s home. After a month, Conrad moved to Victoria Road, the same road my aunt and cousins lived in when I was a child. Then Conrad moved to ‘Ivy Walls’ down Billet Lane, a road that runs behind my own house and a road my grandma first lived in when she arrived in the village. If I was to plot on a map where my family has lived in Stanford and where Conrad lived, they overlap. Is this significant? Not really. But, as I write this, I am reminded of a line about the importance of connecting with others you’ll never meet from the preface to The Children of the Sea, a novel Conrad wrote while living in Stanford. It makes me think of you writing your Pen Sketch: “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.”

Between my house and Conrad’s former home is St. Margaret’s Church (built c. 1180). St. Margaret’s is the heart of the village; a place where we all congregate for memorial services, for Christmas carols, and for summertime parades. In January 2018, I found myself at the church praying to a God I had long neglected when my Anti-Müllerian hormone test (one component of a fertility health check) came back as 7.2 (not good). When a retest came back at 12.8 (good), I placed a single sunflower in the iron ring handle of the side chapel; I looked up at the little Jesus who looked down at me sympathetically and I said, “Thank you.”

I walk past the church every day and cut through the graveyard to get to the train station. The church overlooks the river Hope which now runs alongside the C2C train line – a line that runs from the sea (Southend) to the city (London). Right next to that trainline was where my grandmother lived before she died.

My grandparents moved to Stanford after the Second World War and squatted for a period in a place us locals colloquially call ‘The Sandpits’ (because they were once exactly that – sandpits). My father grew up in a council house in Stanford to parents with strong Stoke accents. When I think of my grandmother, I think of her accent devoid of the hard southern ‘r’ sound and heavy on the short vowel ‘a’: gras, baff, dafft. My grandparents’ garden was half allotment and half recreational. Grandma liked to grow all her own vegetables and home-bake everything from scratch because her own grandmother raised her to be very self-sufficient; in turn Grandma raised the children under her care in the same way. For dinner, I would be dispatched to dig up the potatoes, wash and peel them. Her garden blurred with the neighbours’ one. The neighbour, Mrs Goddard, would amble across the invisible boundary and sit with my grandmother shelling beans. Everyone back then was Mr or Mrs: Mrs Goddard the neighbour, Mr and Mrs Rumsey from Church, Miss Partridge from Partridge’s Dairy, Mr Brand the undertaker, Mr Barber … the barber. Five-minute walks into town took much longer because Mr and Mrs Someone-or-other would stop and talk to Mrs Halden. When my twins were born, so marked four generations of Haldens to the banks of Hope. Great grandchildren to a long-departed Mrs Winifred Halden.

My grandmother was supposed to die, I think, in April 2005. She was in bed, at home, under the gaze of St Margaret’s on the hill. I held her hand in mine and waited for the inevitable. Then, one afternoon, just after lunch, the atmosphere in the room changed; it thickened and became heady. I looked towards the doorway where I expected visitors to be standing. Although I saw nothing standing there, I felt an imposing presence. My grandmother, suddenly awake and suddenly coherent, said to me, “I’m not ready to go.”

“Tell them,” I whispered back. “Tell them to leave.”

The thickness went and the next day my grandmother got up from her bed and lived for another five years.

She actually died in June 2010 when the thickness returned in a sterile side room in Basildon Hospital. At her funeral, led by Mr Brand, the congregation sprawled into the street – the village matriarch had died.

She’s now buried in the graveyard opposite my house. In the summer I grow sunflowers there. Sometimes I cut one and place it in the ring handle of St Margaret’s door.

“My relationships with friends and family are what I value the most.”

My grandmother was raised by her own grandmother after her mother died. Her father ran off, unprepared to take care of three young children on his own. When doing our family tree, we were told not to prod into that history – my grandmother did not want her father to be found. We couldn’t even speak her father’s name in her house because none of us knew it. Years after her death, I discovered amongst lots of papers passed down to me, that Grandma had written her memoir on a slim and water-stained jotter pad. In it, she had recorded her father’s full name. I told my dad what I had discovered; for a moment he was silent and then he simply shrugged. We still won’t speak his name.

What my grandmother struggled with was the injustice of her abandonment. She had a father who raised her for the first few years of her life and who had, in the eyes of the law and ethics of society, the responsibility to provide for that child. That father made a commitment to raise his children and then abandoned his family, leaving behind three little girls (one a newborn) wondering where he had gone and why. He didn’t even leave a pen sketch.

The anti-donation bioethicist David J. Velleman once wrote in a piece called ‘Family History’ that he wouldn’t have wanted to raise his children without knowing his grandparents. His argument is intended to highlight the insufficiency of donor conception and illustrate that donor children are severed from their ancestry and are born ‘disadvantaged’. But this perspective privileges ancestral knowledge when many families, like mine, do not have access to their complete ancestral story. My grandma raised my father well without knowing her father or paternal grandparents. My father raised me well without knowing his grandfather. As for me? I don’t remember my grandfather at all because he died when I was young, but I did know my grandmother extremely well. I knew her well enough to know that she would not have called herself, my children, nor their adopted cousins, disadvantaged abandoned children. Velleman spoke of the immorality of children born to father-absent families, but there is a big difference between the absent father and being fatherless. The difference is intent.

When Grandma’s oldest sister Gladys, my great aunt, started work at sixteen, the father turned up – claiming he was entitled to some of the wages. Grandma’s grandma barred all access and told him where to go. Off a short pier, and all that. He was fuelled by selfish intentions from the start to the end. That was what hurt my grandmother and her sisters the most – his moral bankruptcy. Now I have his name, I could use a site like Ancestry to look up what happened to him and whether he had another family, but I won’t. He isn’t worth locating.

As I say, fatherlessness is different from father absence. You donated to give someone a chance at love and happiness. Your intent was to help infertile couples, solo women and same-sex couples create families because you found such love and acceptance in your own. Your donation was a gift, as too is your pen sketch in which you tell me the story of your ancestry, ironically providing my children with more information about their paternal ancestors than I have about my own.

“I continue to be inspired by great stories.”

My favourite book as a child was Margery Williams The Velveteen Rabbit. In the story, a soft toy bunny is loved by a young boy, so loved that he becomes worn out overtime. The stuffed bunny sees real rabbits bounding around outside and wonders to the wise Skin Horse how to become real. The horse tells him, “When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.” Years later, as preteen, I was transfixed by The Neverending Story. My fear of the Nothing – the maleficent force that consumed the world of Fantasia like a sentient black hole – was very real to me. The boy who saved the world just by uttering his mother’s name became the namesake of one of my sons. I now teach literature and find that the themes I was so transfixed by as a child shine through the texts I love as an adult. The question of the real manifesting in my love of science fiction and its themes of personhood; the fear of the Nothing surfacing in texts about loss and grief.

When my sons were born, I truly felt the significance of the Skin Horse’s words to the toy rabbit: ‘“Real isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you.”’ As the rabbit became real through the love of a child, I too became real.

My boys lived in my heart before they lived in my womb. When my children were born, I didn’t wonder who they were but rather where they had been. I felt like I had always loved them, long before they were placed in my arms.

I chose you to be my donor because your colouring matched mine and because you were a lover of the arts, and a man described as thoughtful. But as I read your sketch, years after my children were born, I discover that we have so much in common. You didn’t choose me, but I wonder if you might have if given the chance. We both love the arts, we both enjoy reading, music and travel. We love our hometown and our families. We are both “inspired by great stories.”

You write that you love being an uncle. I love being a mother. But my longing for them didn’t just come from a place of selfish wanting. I thought I would be a good mother, that I would instil in my children what our parents instilled in us: adventure, passion, respect, security, comfort, and – above all – love. I do that. I don’t think I’ve let you, or them, down.

Sometimes at night, when all is quiet, my mind finds you. I wonder about you. You probably wonder about us. When my children turn eighteen, maybe we will meet. I hope so. Until then, as Conrad once said, “Like a flash of lightning between clouds, we live in the flicker.”