“I hate to see them get bounced home to home,” the foster mother said, passing me my first child.

I held her in my lap, paralyzed. I had brought a toy phone. When she grinned and reached for it, our eyes met, and a social worker took a photo of the moment. Later I wrote on the back: “The first time I saw you.”

I didn’t understand why there wasn’t a stampede of parents to adopt her. That I would get the honor made me tremble. I was so in love I could not say her name to myself, even in a whisper, lest I be denied the joy: Luppi Milov. I thought it was the most euphonious name I had ever heard. My daughter, my love.

As far as I knew, I was capable of getting pregnant. I just didn’t want to. There were half a million children in foster care in need of an adoptive parent. And I wanted children, so this made perfect sense to me.

It didn’t make perfect sense to my friends.

“Aren’t you afraid?” they asked.

No, I wasn’t. I had grown up with poverty, abuse and molestation. If my daughter wasn’t worth saving, neither was I. Besides, I didn’t believe that biology guaranteed love. I had grown up in a biracial family, unrelated to one of my siblings and half-related to others, and I certainly didn’t love them half as much.

Adopting from foster care felt magical. There was a wildness of imagination to it, a proclamation of intent: a decision to love.