What I remember most about meeting my father for this first time was his opening gambit: This pub is one of my favourites. He gestured to a picnic bench and asked me if I wanted a beer.

I was conceived by anonymous donor sperm and for years Id fantasised about meeting my biological father in my head hed loomed large, like an astronaut or Nobel laureate. The only things that my biological mother, Miranda, and her partner Dawn, knew about the donor was that he was green eyed and a medical student. Yet the man I met was an ordinary, unremarkable 50-year old who worked in human resources (turns out he actually had blue eyes and had studied economics), and the entire conversation as we fished around for topics we might have in common and found very few was crushingly disappointing.

He chatted awkwardly about draft beer and football, while I told him about being raised by lesbian mums and my career, and by the time I left the pub in north London, I felt shaken. Far from making me wish Id had a relationship with this man, the experience only made me miss Dawn, who Id always seen as a parent figure and who had died two years earlier. I remember calling Mum and crying down the phone. Hes a nice enough man, but hes not Dawn, I admitted. And yet I decided to give it another shot and meet up with him again.

Id known I didnt have a father for as long as I can remember and for years Id felt OK about it. Back in 1992 when I was born, being conceived by sperm donation was still an oddity, as was being raised by same-sex parents. Our house in the suburbs of Bristol was in a traditional neighbourhood with 2.4-children families and I remember making up ridiculous stories, as a very little kid, to account for being fatherless: my dad being a sailor, for example, who had died at sea. But my creative lesbian home was a haven and we did lots of dressing up and art.

When my mum split up with Dawn, when I was around six, and got together with Jayne, a woman who was visibly more masculine, and loud and proud at the school gates, I started being bullied. I think kids picked up on the fact that there was something different about me from their gossipy parents. A Christian woman who ran the after-school club was especially cruel. I ended up moving schools because I was being picked on.

There were plenty of upsides about having three mums. When I came out as liking boys at the age of 11, they were unsurprised and very supportive. And I knew how much they loved me. Yet there was always a niggling fear, when I was a child, about being incomplete: a fatherless boy without dad to take me to football or show me the ropes. This absent biological father became a mythical godlike figure until my teens when everything changed. It was the 2000s and being from an alternative family was suddenly cool. When another boy with two mums joined my secondary school, I remember being livid: having two mums was mysuperpower.

I always knew that at 18 Id be able to write to the HFEA (Human Fertility and Embryology Authority) for more information about the man who had donated the sperm, but I didnt hold out hope. Back then, sperm could be donated anonymously and only if the donor chose to waiver it could the child apply for the information once theyd turned 18 (although a change in the law means that children conceived after 2005 have an automatic right to know their donors identity). Id read up a little on the statistics and found that only one in ten sperm donors waive their right to anonymity. I wrote off on my 18th birthday and discovered that although there was no news about my donor, I had five donor siblings, two of whom were happy to be contacted. Oddly however, I couldnt get excited about this revelation, as the donor was the one who Id fixated on.

Even so, a few years later, when I was in my early 20s, I decided to track down my half-siblings, mainly as material for my work when I was writing a play about being a donor child. But as I set this up with the HFEA, they sent me the shock news that there had been a mixup and my father WAS able to be contacted after all. I felt a mixture of queasiness and excitement. It was a strange time to hear the news as Dawn had died of cancer a couple of years earlier. Id dearly loved her and considered her a parent and now, suddenly, here was another parent figure emerging.

Looking back, I should have let it all sink in before deciding whether to meet him but I went ahead immediately, after checking with Mum first. I was anxious: would it seem like a betrayal? She seemed excited but worried, though she put on a supportive front.

Desperate to meet him, I carefully hand-wrote a letter to him thanking him for his involvement in my life, enclosing a photo and my email and tentatively suggesting we meet for coffee. It took him less than a week to email back - and it was a pretty nail-biting time. I spent it obsessively Googling him, looking into his career history as well as finding a small pixelated headshot. Mum helped with the research and I loved that she was so much a part of it all

By the time we finally met, my nerves were still raw. Id told friends in London about it and my then-partner, and they were all supportive. The problem was that they couldnt really understand how it felt to meet this man that was so instrumental in my being, but wasnt a dad. Mum advised me not to get my hopes up in advance of the meeting, adding be yourself Jordan, thats enough.

After the shock of discovering this man I had built up in my head was an ordinary bloke, it struck me that were were oddly similar in some ways, particularly our mannerisms like the way he moved his hands and gazed off into the near distance and his prominent nose that was far more like mine than my Mums dainty button one.

I asked what compelled him to become a donor - he had donated five times - and when he admitted that it was for the money as hed been a student at the time and that hed only come forward because of his Catholic beliefs, it hurt. Happily he was very unjudgmental about my lesbian mums. It would have been tough if there had been any note of homophobia, or disapproval.

We groped around for other things we might have in common: politics, work, social attitudes, and found very little. He was into money and cars while I had stayed true to my chickpea-eating hippy roots instilled in me by my Mums.

We left it hanging but I could sense he wanted to meet me again. So we kept in touch and a few months later he suggested we meet again. By this point the swell of disappointment had subsided and I thought: why not?

It made me even more grateful to my mum and Dawn for the way they raised me and how loving my upbringing had been. On some level, I thought that meeting him would heal the emotions around Dawns death, but instead it had starkly reminded me of what Id lost. I became depressed and only got through it with the help of my mum and my two half sisters, conceived from the same donor. Id met up with them in person shortly before I met the donor - theyd also met him in person - they were both thoughtful women, born within a week of me [same year] and we shared personality traits and understood each other like no one else could: we had been through the same emotional ups and downs, high expectations and crashing disappointments of meeting our sperm donor and they were extremely supportive.

Looking back at it all, I feel conflicted. Being a sperm donor child is quite new and society projects all sorts of baggage onto us of being somehow lacking, and that can be tough. What does it mean if we dont feel fatherless? And if we do, is that in some way a rejection of the parents who raised us?

Ive seen my donor a few times since that first meeting and were building a relationship, of sorts, at a distance. Hes part of the puzzle that made me but hell never be my dad, and thats OK. I had all the parenting a boy could need. Meeting the donor has affected my relationship with mum in a lovely way: we were close before but now we share everything. Sometimes what were searching for is in front of us all along.

More here:
I met my sperm donor birth father after years of wondering and was left crushingly disappointed - Telegraph.co.uk