Imagine finding out, deep into middle age, that you're the son of the honey-gargling king of yacht rock. Michael Goessling, a St. Louis resident, recently had just such an experience when he found out that he's Michael McDonald's son. For his whole life, Goessling knew that he was adopted. His parents conceived him when both of them were 14 years old, and he was put up for adoption as an infant. But Goessling didn't learn until much later that one of his parents grew up to become Michael McDonald.
Goessling recently told the story to the Kansas City CBS affiliate KCTV. He had a great childhood with his adopted family, and he only found out that he had a half-brother when his half-brother did a 23andMe DNA test. That led Goessling to meet his half-brother and then his biological mother, then to speak to his biological father on the phone. Goessling asked the man what he does for a living, and he said he's a musician who would soon come through St. Louis on tour. Goessling tells KCTV, "I said, ‘Are you Michael McDonald?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m afraid so.'"
Apparently, the two Michaels' shared first name is a total coincidence. Also, the fact that McDonald was 14 when Goessling was born is presumably why the two men in that photo do not look like father and son. (Goessling met his biological mother, whose identity is not public, on his 58th birthday. McDonald is 74.) The news story doesn't touch on whether people have been telling Goessling for years that he looks like Michael McDonald, but perhaps we can make our own assumptions there.
McDonald tells KCTV, "I always carried that guilt with me. But just to know that he was okay and that he had a good life, and a life certainly that I wouldn’t have been able to afford him at that time, was a great reward. The real rock stars in this story are his adoptive parents, who really gave Michael everything that a child needs in terms of love and security... It was a wonderful experience to see Michael and to get to meet my son, after all these years thinking about him."
The first time that Goessling and McDonald met in person, they gave each other a big hug and said that they love each other. Upon meeting Goessling, McDonald also found out that he's a grandfather. He says, "That's still sinking in to me. What a gift."
A couple of years ago, McDonald published What A Fool Believes, a memoir that he co-wrote with the comedian and actor Paul Reiser; that was his first time revealing that he became a father that young. Something similar recently happened with Billy Idol, who talked about meeting his own long-lost son, also via 23andMe test, in a documentary last year.
