“The wait can be very difficult,” our Boston social worker said to us more than a year ago. “But when it comes to adoption, A + B + C = D and eventually you will end up with your baby.” A math-phobe, I liked the simplicity of the equation and repeated it like a mantra in the car on the way home.

Back when I was pregnant — briefly, for eight short weeks, three years ago — I holed up in bed in the evenings, eating egg salad on whole-wheat sandwiches, and reading gossip magazines. And, then, my world stopped. Enter Angelina Jolie. Watching Angelina jet around the world with her beautiful adopted children changed the way I thought about adoption and becoming a mother.

“Here’s something you can do,” said our social worker, a woman whose own (now teenage) children were adopted from India, and who knows first-hand how hard it can be to wait for an adoption to go through. “The second round …

We’ve been at the top of our adoption agency’s waiting list for weeks and weeks. Still, this time of waiting has been mostly, and surprisingly, happy. When I started trying to conceive, a little more than three years ago, I …

Last Friday, I took the T to South Station to meet a 12:15 bus from Northampton. I’d selected my outfit as carefully as I would on a first date. The person I was meeting text messaged me that morning to …

After returning from India into the bleakness of a New England winter, the adoption felt farther away than ever. On the worst days, I found myself starting to sink into the kind of depression I hadn’t experienced in a long …