I had come in picturing something almost romantic — a lonely woman with a surplus of love, a child in need of it, the two simply introduced and allowed to begin.

The reality was training sessions and interviews and background checks and home visits and a mountain of paperwork, and long, heavy conversations about childhood trauma that left me shaken each time I drove home.

I learned, over those months, the single most important thing anyone taught me in the whole process, which was this: loving a child is not enough.

I had believed, coming in, that love would be the whole of it, that if I simply loved a child hard enough, everything else would follow.