My grandmother liked to gamble. We would go to Atlantic City sometimes and sit together at the blackjack tables while she smoked and patiently explained strategy to me. It was fun to be doing something she enjoyed, fun to go out to dinner and eat the pickled tomatoes that came to the table with the menus, but I didn’t care for the gambling. There is enough in life that is annoying and imprecise and ill-defined without a single card that might be a one but could just as well be an 11. I offer that not moralistically, just personally. Personally, gambling is not my thing. This might be why I was so torn about having a child.

But one moonlit night on a white-sand beach in Florida, while the surf crashed in the background and my beloved and I murmured to one another adoring, awe-inspired, faithful declarations of love, a baby happened anyway.

Like most family planning that happens on a moonlit beach, ours was a split-second decision. A split-second decision following the opposite kind. For a long time, my husband and I were not sure we wanted children. We loved each other, and we loved our life, and having a child seemed the ultimate gamble. So the conversation on the beach was not the first we had about whether to have children. It was maybe the 100th. It was maybe the 700th. I was in Florida on holiday with my mother and had wandered to the beach to talk to my husband on the phone in Seattle. I said the water is beautiful; you would love it. He said I miss you; nothing is as good when you’re gone. I said the sand is still warm from the sun; I wish you were here. He said I’m glad you’re having fun, but I’m ready for you to come home now.

Then, as conversations do, this one took a turn. Let’s be brave, we said. Let us leap, we said. Then we said we should have a baby, the culmination of years of conversation on the topic, the opposite of gambling. It was maybe the most well-thought-out reproduction in history. And in the next moment, the very next breath, we said let’s adopt.

Laurie Frankel and her husband, Paul.

We decided in an instant because it felt good, it felt right, and there was no going back. Here is a thing that is unfortunately true: most families formed through adoption have done so out of necessity. There is only one parent, perhaps, or there are two but they can’t get pregnant because of infertility, say, or being the same sex, or a medical problem. My family is formed through adoption but not out of necessity. My husband and I chose that path. So far as we know, I could have become pregnant and made a baby that way, but we chose adoption instead. I don’t have as many opportunities to say that as I would like. I fear it sounds smug or self-righteous, and I don’t intend it to. But I do think people look at my family and imagine that we settled for each other, that my husband and I would have preferred a child who was biologically ours but settled for adoption because the other option was childlessness. And this is simply not true.

I like to say so because there is so much heartbreak for people who cannot, for whatever reason, get or stay pregnant. In vitro fertilisation, fertility drugs, donor eggs and embryos, surrogacy – these things are no joke. They are often harsh, painful, invasive, expensive procedures that may not have very good odds of success. Of course, there is heartbreak for children who need but do not have families. Adoption is not for everyone, but I do think there would be less misery in the world and more love if adoption felt like a viable option for more people, if it didn’t feel like second-best. That’s why I like to tell this story.

Like all good stories – and most gambles – this one goes in directions I didn’t bet on. When we decided to adopt from South Korea, we knew the child would be Korean and that we would still be white Americans. When we decided to adopt a baby, rather than an older child, we knew there would be lots of sleepless nights and alarming fluids. So we made plans for those prospects and smugly felt as if we were counting cards, controlling the odds, turning that high-roller bet to have a child into something more akin to fiscally conservative financial planning.

It turns out parenting only works like that in the abstract. Then you have an actual child. You worry about every single thing you can think of, but it proves necessary to worry about any number of additional things as well. You do everything you can to protect them, but then you willingly let them out of the house into the world. We thought we accounted for everything in the decision-making phase, but having a child, no matter how you do it, is nothing but gambling, inviting random, uncontrollable chance to take over your life.

Yet, oddly, having a child wasn’t what my friends wanted to warn me about. It was adopting one. One friend said: “Use your genes. That’s what they’re for.” Another said: “Think what smart, pretty babies you and your husband would make.” Another said: “Won’t you miss getting to be pregnant?” Another said: “Children are exasperating. The only reason you don’t kill them is because your biology recognises them at some primal level.”

The adoption agency was appropriately cautious as well. It made us read books about what to do if we didn’t bond, if this child came to us but did not feel like ours. It made us fill out forms about what medical conditions would cause us to say no to a child who had been matched with us. It made us write up worksheets with sections about how to deal with problems such as abandonment and rage. What if your adopted child is angry and sets fire to your home or pet, it asked.

Laurie Frankel and her husband in South Korea.

In casinos, the fact that you will probably lose is foregone. What’s exciting is the small chance that you just might win. This felt like the opposite. The odds that we would not love this child exactly as if I had grown her myself seemed infinitesimal to me, unthinkable, impossible. She was just a baby. We were just her parents. How hard could it be?

We went to Seoul to pick her up nine months to the day after we filled out our first piece of paperwork. It was also her nine-month birthday. Her foster mother held her out, and she came right into my arms, wrapping hers around my neck, pressing her chest into mine, nestling her head into my shoulder. “She knows who her mother is,” the social worker said. I cried. My husband cried. Our new daughter cried. None of it seemed appreciably different to me than having a baby any other way.

Then we put to rest immediately – all three of us – any worry that she would not at once feel entirely ours. It wasn’t because of some kind of fated belonging or maternal instinct or emotional bonding. It was because her needs, like any baby’s, were so immense, and my husband and I were the ones who had to meet them. We finalised paperwork and went back to the airport, our new nine-month-old now no one’s but ours. She was not happy. We were strangers. We smelled weird. We talked weird. We no doubt mixed her formula in a way she wasn’t used to. It was time to sleep, but her bed was nowhere in evidence. We could not yet discern her various cries. We were fuzzy, even, on how to change a nappy. We did the best we could in the airport. Then we got on a plane for 13 hours.

In some ways, that long, horrible flight home was harder than labour. In other ways, it was nothing more than what we signed up for. These are the long odds of parenthood. There will be tears, and you won’t know why. There will be tears, and, try though you will, you won’t always be able to make it better. There will be long, hard, befuddling journeys, and all you can do is hold one another until you land on the other side. And then set out – and roll the dice – once again.

• Laurie Frankel is the author of This Is How It Always Is, published by Headline, £16.99. To order a copy for £14.44, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on orders of more than £10, online only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.