I thought they were funny and savvy and sweet. I saw the musical Rent 14 times (more than any gay male I knew, just to dispel some stereotypes there) before it dawned on me that all that attractive androgyny could be mine in a slightly more female form. In other words, I had to discover a queer culture that seemed glamorous and exciting to me before I could own what I’d known about myself all along. It was almost like I had to convince myself that I’d chosen to be gay simply because it was more interesting than being straight.

Flash forward ten years. Cecilia and I get married in Vancouver. We visit our friendly neighborhood lesbian-owned sperm bank. I think, Maybe I won’t be a late bloomer this time! My over-achieving heart finds this incredibly appealing. A handful of our straight friends have kids, and we know two lesbian couples who’ve gotten pregnant on the second or third try. It all seems the same, plus or minus a couple hundred bucks for frozen sperm.

But three IUIs, one cycle of IVF and one miscarriage later, I know it’s not the same. I escalated to infertility treatment faster than any straight woman would have. In some ways, this appeased my impatience. But Cecilia and I never had the luxury of thinking, Maybe it will happen when we least expect it.

I know many infertile straight couples have wrestled feelings of inadequacy, loneliness and lack of control. (And, as the owner of a blocked fallopian tube, low progesterone, and “thick egg walls,” I can proudly count myself among the Infertiles as well as the Gays.) So maybe you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that, instead of feeling like I’d happily chosen a more fun and edgy life than my peers, I felt like a kid who’d been pushed out of the closet—kicking, screaming and unprepared.

Cecilia and I were always open to the idea of adoption, so having non-biological kids didn’t require a paradigm shift on our part. But realizing that our lives and our family will be different from those of our friends because of it? That’s taken some adjustment. We wonder if we should have a baby shower—what if the expectant mom decides to parent at the last minute? Will it be painful to have a house full of pastel onesies and ducky blankets?

Like most gay parents-to-be, Cecilia and I have thought about the day when our child will come home from school crying because of something ugly or confusing a classmate said about having two moms. Although our family and friends are uber-supportive of our decision to become parents, our culture at large is more skeptical. I’m not talking about flat-out homophobes—I’m talking about the people who “gently” suggest that having gay parents is “a lot for a kid to deal with.” You hear a similar refrain when it comes to adoption.

And it’s true: having two moms or two dads, plus a birthmom and a birthfather, is a lot for a kid to deal with. But you know what? So is starting kindergarten. So is moving to a new house. So is losing a tooth or a pet or a grandparent or a parent. So is the birth of a new sibling or the diagnosis of a learning difference or realizing that your best friend wants to be best friends with someone else.

Life is a lot to deal with. And because new parents and pregnant couples tend to be idealistic, I suspect they don’t like to be reminded that there are certain realities they can’t protect their children from. When those challenges are known from the start—as is the case with LGBT parenting, single parenting and adoption—there’s a tendency to blame parents for bringing kids into a difficult situation on purpose. But I don’t think of it that way: The challenges you know about are the ones you can prepare for. We LGBT/single/adoptive parents can’t pretend our kids’ lives will be sheltered and easy. But I like to think that we’ll be better parents for it.

A few years ago, my friend Daisye and her partner Laura moved from Olympia, Washington—an idyllic city for hipsters, queers and other Portlandia types—to a tiny town on the Hood River. They opened a store where they sell secondhand oddities. Most of their friends and neighbors are straight and over sixty. The whole town is on a finicky septic system, and they help each other out when someone’s toilet breaks or someone’s house floods.

“We realized that we could live in Olympia for years,” Daisye told me, “or we could take a leap of faith and really embrace a different kind of life.”

Sometimes that life is a choice. Sometimes it’s not. But the embracing of it is always a choice. And when I imagine our future—birthmom dropping by, bouncing our child while she updates us about her new boyfriend or her college classes or the kids she’s raising herself—it looks like a different-kind-of-life I can love. I also know that, no matter what I imagine, the reality will be something different. And I think I can embrace that too.

I’ve been working hard at that “networking” stuff the IAC advises hopeful adoptive parents to do. I’ve been keeping our Facebook page up to date with photos and posts that show WHAT A HAPPY, LOVING, READY-FOR-A-BABY COUPLE WE ARE! I’ve been blogging here and on our adoption website. And, like many things on the internet, it can feel kind of like a black hole. (See how I’m working that space metaphor?) It’s like homework for a moderately fun class, which bares minimal relation to Cecilia’s and my desire to parent an actual baby.

That desire is deep and real and personal, and it lives on a planet of its own.

So imagine my surprise when a number I didn’t recognize popped up on my cell phone and for once it wasn’t  a wrong number or the recorded voice of Congressman Javier Becerra or the woman from Carnival Cruise Lines asking if we’d planned our next vacation.

A crazy five days ensued. I won’t go into the details, because the woman who called us is real—so amazingly, fantastically real—and she and her husband are still out there living their lives and making plans for their baby. But I will say this: We talked to them on the phone. We Skyped with them for an hour. They saw one of our cats and we saw their dog. Paws were waved.

During this time two things became clear: 1) how much we liked and respected them and 2) that this wasn’t the right situation for us.

My parents raised me to work hard and not take things for granted. So if an opportunity arises and I don’t seize it, I panic that I’ll never get another because, clearly, I must not be serious about my goals. Cecilia looks at the world differently. She likes to live in that “maybe” zone, where anything could happen. For all you Meyers-Briggs fans out there, she is the P to my J.

So you can guess how our conversations went. And they were good conversations that we needed to have—and which we probably couldn’t have had without looking adoption square in the face.

It killed me to walk away from this couple. They hadn’t officially selected us yet, and maybe they never would have, but they told us, sincerely, that they thought we would make great parents. Our families and friends have said the same thing, but to hear it from two people who meant You would make great parents for OUR BABY may be the biggest compliment we’ve ever received.

It was the opposite of what the universe had seemed to be communicating during the course of our unsuccessful fertility treatments and miscarriage. Something inside me healed a little bit more.

Of course, ultimately we’re not in this for compliments. We’re in this because we want to raise a child, and it’s hard to return to the world of waiting. But we’ll never forget the couple who made the hypothetical seem probable.

A few red flags there, right? But Melanie had confessed excitedly to her husband that she thought this was “the one.” Her adoption counselor gently explained what was going on. Melanie was disappointed, but she felt like the experience was a rite of passage.

Flash forward to the next support group meeting. Melanie and Tim had been contacted by two more scammers. This time they were more cautious, and the group joked about how, soon, they’d be picking up the phone and snapping “Whaddayuhwant?”

By this point, Cecilia’s and my profile had gone live, and I’d been checking the Gmail account we’d linked to it every day. All we had to show for our efforts was one piece of spam. Not an adoption scam—just regular old Viagra spam.

Everyone says that the longer you wait, the more you’ll start wondering, What’s wrong with us? Why are other people adopting before we do? What I didn’t expect was to envy people who’d been contacted by a fake birthmother.

Melanie and Tim are an attractive couple with a witty profile. Were Cecilia and I not cute enough? Were our Halloween costume photos not as cool as Melanie and Tim’s? Did our profile make us seem poor, and therefore bad targets for extortion?

A few weeks later, our lonely little inbox had an email with the subject line “bady for adoption.” I’d been hoping for a baby, but hey, maybe a bady would do. The emailer explained that she’d gotten pregnant and been dumped by her boyfriend. She’d given birth already (red flag #1) and was currently living in the street, but wanted to go back to school. She didn’t give any specifics about her daughter (red flag #2) or say anything about what drew her to our profile (red flag #3) or ask any questions (red flag #4—but maybe some people are just rude?).

As a finishing touch, she’d attached two baby photos that appeared to be lifted straight from a JC Penney catalog. You could even see that some kind of logo had been half cropped from the bottom (giant, enormous, comical red flag).

But, well, the baby was really cute. As most child models are.

I did what I was supposed to do: I sent a short, polite reply empathizing with her situation and encouraging her to call the IAC; forwarded the email to our adoption counselor; and notified an intake counselor. I congratulated myself on not getting fooled, even as a tiny part of me hoped that soon we’d be laughing with our birthmother about how we’d initially mistaken her email for a scam. We would bounce our insta-baby and discuss putting the money from her JC Penney shoot in a college savings account.

It’s been a week since that email, and I haven’t heard back from the alleged expectant mother, so I guess she’s moved on. I was sort of hoping she would email back, if only to ask us to wire her money for tuition. I guess I liked playing the part of actual adoptive parent as much as she liked pretending to have a baby for us.

Next time, I hope neither we nor the woman contacting us will be just going through the motions. In the meantime, I’ll comfort myself with the knowledge that our profile is out there in the world—where, as every parent knows, all sorts of good and bad realities await.

After processing my own grief a little more and reading testimonials by birthmothers—their pain sometimes leaping off my computer screen—I started to think about what our hypothetical birthmom might have in common with me. So here’s my list, in the form of a very different kind of Dear Birthmother letter.

1. We know that life is unpredictable. I wanted to be pregnant. You wanted not to be. Neither of us got our way, and I’m guessing that we both felt frustrated by the lack of control we had over our own bodies.

2. We have big plans for the future. Cecilia and I daydream about introducing our parents to their first grandkid, reading her Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, or helping him with college applications. Maybe you want to go back to school, or devote more time to the child(ren) you already have, or start your own business. Either way, we’re the kind of people who think ahead. You and I are not goofballs who get thrashed in the currents of life. We look out for those waves and grab our surfboards.

3. We’re terrified. You’re probably thinking, Can I really trust these people to raise my baby? What if they don’t honor our contact agreement? Not to mention, Oh my god, a live human being is going to come out of my body at some point. We’re thinking, What if she changes her mind at the last minute? What if she doesn’t stay in touch and our child wonders why? What if there are complications with the birth? We’re both taking a leap of faith.

4. We’ve become adoption educators. I know a woman who placed a child for adoption when she was 19. At the time, people she knew said, “How can you be so cruel?” She (and you and I) know that the opposite is true: Placing a child for adoption is an act of love and selflessness. Cecilia and I have gotten our fair share of infuriating questions. Sometimes people assume that adoption is a “last resort.” Just because it’s the thing we tried second doesn’t mean it’s our second choice. But you and I keep our cool (most of the time) and remind ourselves that the more open we are about open adoption, the more understanding the world will become.

5. Sometimes we’ve felt frustrated with the IAC. When our adoption coordinator sent us his 59^th edit of our (undeniably awesome!) letter to you, we wanted to throttle him. When we had to lock up all sharp objects and install a handrail at our house and a zillion other things that other parents of newborns never have to do, we wanted to scream, Why are you picking on us? When your IAC counselor made you track down the birthfather you were so done with, or kept telling you how sad you’d feel, or asked you a bunch of questions about stuff that should be private, you probably wanted to scream, Why are you picking on me?

6. But usually we realized the IAC was right. The truth is, they’ve done this many more times than you or I have, and they have hundreds of happy families to show for it. I still don’t understand what’s so terrible about having sunglasses on top my head in a photo, but I’m willing to take their word for it.

7. We want to impress each other. Have I already thought about what I’ll wear the first time Cecilia and I meet you? You bet I have. Something that says, I have maternal instincts to spare! I’m neither a slob nor a snob! I’m responsible yet fun! I’m guessing you’ll be wearing maternity clothes, but limited wardrobe options don’t mean you’re any less conscious of what our first impression of you will be.

8. We want to make a new friend. You know how, on reality shows, contestants always say, “I’m not here to make friends”? Well, Cecilia and I are here to make friends. True, our friendship with you will be the kind that includes a lot of intense conversations and a big stack of paperwork. But we know that none of it would work without the things that make any friendship strong: shared values, trust and the ability to laugh together. Yeah, yeah, we both know it’s all about the kid. But that doesn’t mean we can’t share a pizza and talk about our favorite movies.

9. We both want to name the baby Apple Zuma Coco Bronx Klein-Ybarra. Just kidding. I’m pretty confident that we’ll both come down on the side of non-food- or geography-related names. But there will undoubtedly be a few things we don’t see eye to eye on. That’s where good communication and a little friendly mediation from the IAC come in.

10. We both love this baby like crazy. If we didn’t, how could we possibly put up with all the paperwork, anxiety, uncertainty, heartbreak, stretch marks and stinky diapers? In other words, we’re just like any other parents.

Cheryl Klein is a fiction writer and arts administrator living in Los Angeles. She and her spouse Cecilia are currently waiting to match. Get to know them here: http://www.iheartadoption.org/users/ccandcheryl