I remember the day that I let all that go, finally, and allowed myself to truly consider adoption. I was alone, walking through my living room in the afternoon. I'm not prone to dramatics, but when the acceptance hit, it felt like a sailboat boom swung around in a high wind and smacked me in the chest.

It was quite a leap to make after so many years of fierce effort. We had to give up any genetic connection to the child we would raise. Our hope of passing on my curly hair or Marty’s blue eyes? Forget it. I also had to give up all control of the prenatal period. Someone else would carry our child, eat and drink and think whatever they wanted, and might or might not give the baby to us when the pregnancy was over. No law can make them, and I wouldn’t want it to. I just had to hope and trust that they would decide that baby would be mine.

I had to let go of the illusion of control. Over anything.

But in the end, all of this sounded better to me than never having a family at all. The scales tipped, and I said yes.

* * *

That was late 2005. I said yes, specifically, to open adoption. Because I knew that's how I would want it handled if I were adopted—with my birth family fully knowable to me.

Nowadays, 95 percent of adoptions are “open” to some degree. Even as recently as 1997, only 16 percent of the general public approved of birth mothers sending cards or letters to adoptive families. Even though the current trend is toward openness, incorporating birth family members into the life of our child did not sound like an easy or comfortable thing. But when an adoption social worker told me that the family could be whatever the adoptive parents and the birth parents decide to create together, I calmed down.

We were lucky. We didn’t go through an agency and pay the fees associated with that. Marty’s cousin Susie, who’s an obstetrician, knew what we were going through, and told us that from time to time, a patient came in pregnant and asking about how adoption works and where to go. If we wanted, cousin Susie would tell the next nice-seeming pregnant woman about us, and we could try to arrange a private adoption.

Susie warned us, though, that sometimes years went by between potential birth-mom sightings. We hunkered down and got ready for the long wait.

Two months later I got an email from Susie that said only “Call me.”

The pregnant woman was named Laney, and she was 14 weeks along. She lived in Charleston, two states and 10 hours south of us. The baby inside her was a girl. Just what we’d hoped for.

Three months later, after much emailing and a few phone calls, Marty and I walked into the restaurant where Laney worked. There she stood, next to a self-serve case of single-serving yogurts, looking so pregnant I thought she would burst on the spot.

I embraced the petite, curly-headed blond woman who held the tiny person we hoped would be our baby, and in that crystalizing instant, everything felt right. What could have been a terribly awkward and anxiety-producing time just wasn’t. Laney was young—22—but sure of herself, and somehow already sure of us. We were already sure of her, too.