I called my therapist. I was crying so hard I could barely talk. “I want to keep her,” I said.

“I need you to listen to me, but you’re not going to like what I’m about to say,” she said. “The best and most enlightened thing to do, energetically and emotionally, is to be hoping and wishing and praying” that the baby’s biological mother would get her life together and be able to take the baby back.

I had been hoping and wishing and praying she would disappear.