There was no guarantee that doing an open adoption would get us a baby any faster than doing a closed or foreign adoption. In fact, our agency warned us that, as a gay male couple, we might be in for a long wait. This point was driven home when both birth mothers who spoke at the two-day open adoption seminar we were required to attend said that finding “good, Christian homes” for their babies was their first concern.

But we decided to go ahead and try to do an open adoption anyway. If we became parents, we wanted our child’s biological parents to be a part of his life.

As it turns out we didn’t have to wait long. A few weeks after our paperwork was done, we got a call from the agency. A 19-year-old homeless street kid — homeless by choice and seven months pregnant by accident — had selected us from the agency’s pool of screened parent wannabes. The day we met her the agency suggested all three of us go out for lunch — well, four of us if you count Wish, her German shepherd, five if you count the baby she was carrying.

We were bursting with touchy-feely questions, but she was wary, only interested in the facts: she knew who the father was but not where he was, and she couldn’t bring up her baby on the streets by herself. That left adoption. And she was willing to jump through the agency’s hoops — which included weekly counseling sessions and a few meetings with us — because she wanted to do an open adoption, too.