Mark MacDonald and daughters.Photo: Courtesy Mark MacDonald and Rachel Elliott
When Mark MacDonald met his long-lost sister Rachel Elliott, he found more than just a sibling — and they were both blessed with the ultimate gift of all: family.
MacDonald, an adjunct professor at Portland State University and principal engineer at Intel Corporation, and Elliott, who works in mortgage lending, tell their story in their new memoir,Love and Genetics, out March 22. The book took a decade to actually write, but their journey to each other took even longer.
However, everything changed after he and his wife Tina found out they would not be able to safely have children. “I really wanted, at some level, to know who I was biologically related to, to be able to feel that connection that I had hoped to get through children,” MacDonald, 49, explains.
In addition to looking into surrogacy, MacDonald begansearching for his birth mother.
“I’m Canadian, so it went through the Canadian government, which is a very slow process,” he explains. “But I got a call one day saying that they had found my biological mother and that she wanted to meet me.”
That day, he also learned that she had gone on to marry his biological father, with whom she welcomed three more kids.
Although the fact that he had siblings was a revelation for MacDonald, his sister had already known about him for a few years at that point. While she was pregnant with her second daughter, Elliott, now 46, said that her mom took her Chili’s and told her everything.
There were “tears in my quesadilla,” Elliott says.
Mark MacDonald and Rachel Elliott after their first in-person meeting.Courtesy Mark MacDonald and Rachel Elliott
Even though she didn’t yet know his name, or anything else about him, Elliott immediately knew that she loved her older brother — and once she learned that MacDonald had sought them out, waiting for him to make contact proved too difficult.
While at choir practice one day, her husband took her into the office and “projected a picture of Mark that my mom had emailed him and said, ‘Here’s his e-mail address, go for it.’ "
“I ran home and I dumped my stuff and opened my laptop and poured a glass of wine and then gulped it,” she recalls. “Then I wrote an email and then deleted the whole email, and then poured another glass of wine.”
Right from the start, MacDonald says their connection was “extraordinarily intense” — and he wanted to “know everything.”
“Every email I received was like manna for the soul,” he shares. “I became this obsessive teenager-type doing nothing but checking my email and sending responses all the time.”
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About seven weeks in, MacDonald and his wife flew to Kentucky to meet his genetic family for the first time.
“They were still largely strangers to me, but I’d never felt so comfortable,” he shares of that first meeting in 2007. “They fit me like a glove. I knew that this is what being part of a biological family could feel like.”
Then, just over two months later, when Elliott flew to Oregon for her first one-on-one visit with MacDonald, she offered to be the couple’s surrogate.
“Tina and I were obviously aware that Rachel would be an ideal candidate as a surrogate,” MacDonald explains. “But I told Tina we’re not going to bring it up.”
Unbeknownst to him, even before stepping on the plane, Elliott knew she was going to ask.
Wanting to choose the perfect time to bring it up, she waited until their last family dinner. Without any hesitation, both MacDonald and his wife said yes. And a year to the day from that night, MacDonald’s twin girls, daughters Alaska Rachel and Zoe Rachel, were born on Aug. 19, 2008.
(L-R) Mark, Rachel, Mark’s wife Tina, and the twins soon after they were born.Courtesy Mark MacDonald and Rachel Elliott
MacDonald says that telling their story is ultimately something he did for his daughters, now 13. “I wanted them to know their story and what a wonderful sequence of events and wonderful people came together to make it possible,” he says.
As for actually reading the book, MacDonald says one of his daughters, “the bold one,” read it when she was 8 “and gave me editing notes.” He says his other daughter still needs “another couple of years to get to the place where she’ll feel comfortable reading it.”
Meanwhile, people often credit Elliott with giving her brother “such a beautiful gift,” but she says she’s the one who “got the most amazing gift of all.”
“I got a brother,” she says.
source: people.com
