Here’s the plan: we’re starting IVF, and we’ve scheduled to meet with an adoption caseworker who’s going to help get us started with filling out an application. This isn’t an either/or thing. It’s one of the reasons we want to start the adoption process now, before we know what results the IVF might or might not bring. We don’t want it to seem—to ourselves or anyone else—that the adoption is dependent on whether we become pregnant or not.

Everyone says the adoption process moves at glacial speeds, but given how spaced out the IVF is going to be, given my teaching schedule and how I basically need to stick to school holidays for while I’m being monitored at the clinic, that’s going to move pretty slow too. It’s perfectly possible that we might get selected by a birth parent before we have a verdict on the IVF situation.

In short, who knows how the cards will play out, but what our ideal is, is to have both at some point. And maybe it’ll happen and maybe it won’t, but what a dream it would be to become a family of four this way. I’m not saying it’s all the same to us, by the way, pregnancy versus adoption: I know they’re different things. Two experiences of gratitude and wonder: the same emotions, different nuances.

What a dream to experience both.

I can’t pinpoint when this began exactly. It didn’t start as an idea, but literally as a dream. After we came back from Florida, about a week into the new school term, I started having this odd dream. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and realize the doorbell had just rung. In the dream I got out of bed, walked downstairs to the front door. And then, when I opened it, there was a child there.

They’d be standing on the front step, facing away from me, looking out at the sky where the first threads of dawn were showing.

I never saw their face. Every time before they turned around, I woke up. I never even saw if it was a boy or a girl. All I saw was that small, intent body turned towards the horizon.

I think it was after about a week of that dream that I sat Oliver down and asked him what he thought about adoption.

Not as backup. A different kind of gift.

Slowly, something sparked in his eyes that surprised me.

“And what if you end up with both at the same time?” Dinah says, eyes wide. “Gillian! What if you’ve, like, just given birth and then you’re going to the hospital to collect this other kid?”

There’s an appalled look on her face which she’s trying so badly to conceal that we both laugh a little.

I clear my throat.