The daffodils I planted are coming up near the stump, at the top of the driveway and in the corner of the yard. 

I’ve grown to love fall planting. But I never feel like doing it when it’s time. The energy of the earth is in wind-down mode, and so am I. It’s an act of faith, really – if I dig this dirt and throw this ugly thing in the ground, it will turn into something that will make me smile. Later. Much later. When I don’t feel like digging, a small voice in my head says, “Just do it, Gretchen. You’ll be so happy in the spring.”

And I am, every time.

The first year I planted bulbs, I planted a large sea of rainbow tulips in the 4 garden beds that line the perimeter of my building where my business lives. 

I didn’t plant those bulbs very orderly. Once I got to digging, it felt too complicated to plant perfectly neat rows. And when I tried to space the bulbs the way the gardening blogs said to do it, they kept flopping over on their sides and leaning into each other.

The way I garden is the way I do almost everything in my life. Even though there are perfectly good instructions available, I always end up winging it. I think I laugh off this habit sometimes, act like it’s a symptom of being so incredibly carefree. But it’s not. It’s a decision. A calculated risk. (What is it in me that feels the need to hide my deliberateness?)

It’s not that I don’t want to put the effort in to research and find out exactly what I’m supposed to do. It’s just that I want to see what happens if I do it my way. I want to get to the doing, get on with seeing if it works. 

Here’s my method: try it, see what happens, fix it next time. It’s inefficient, I can see that. But it also helps me develop a relationship with the plant. When it works, I am thrilled. And when it doesn’t, or when it starts to grow but in a wonky way, I take a step back and say, “Ahh, I see the problem.” I take a look at the plant and I say, “Now I see who you are and what you need.”

It’s a relationship we’re starting and somehow I think if I did it perfectly using someone else’s recipe I wouldn’t develop the ability to feel the plant and tend to it from that knowing place. I wouldn’t be attuned to watching it and knowing when something is going wrong.

Recently, I’ve been judging myself for some of my choices along the way as I’ve been pursuing motherhood. Why didn’t I just call up my friend who is a midwife and ask her to meet with me? Why didn’t I research the best fertility clinic in the world, book a flight, and go? Why didn’t I find all the specialists and go to all the appointments and just let them write me a protocol and follow it? I find myself staring in the mirror, on the cusp of sharing all details of my story when Incredibly Wanted launches in a few weeks, and I’m asking myself, “Did I do this all wrong?” I’m frustrated. It’s inefficient. I’ve been at this too long.

But thinking about the way I garden, I can actually see why I did it the way I did. It wasn’t just that I was embarrassed about my situation and afraid to ask for help. It wasn’t just that I was afraid that, as a single woman, someone would tell me I’m crazy and shouldn’t be trying to become a mother alone. It wasn’t just that I expected pregnancy to happen a little swiftly than is typical. It’s because this is actually the way I do things, and the way we do one thing is the way we do everything, as they say. As I said, here’s my method (for everything, apparently): try it, see what happens, fix it next time.

So now that I’ve noticed it, the question is – do I stand behind this method?

Yes and no, I guess. When it comes to trying to get pregnant, I feel badly for the version of me who was starting out on this journey from such a bruised, discouraged place that I couldn’t reach out to anyone for help. There’s a wealth of wisdom out there from women and midwives and doulas about how to improve your chances of getting pregnant, and I wish I would asked for some of that support. But then again, for me, through that period of trial and error and really studying my own body and learning from my attempts to become pregnant, I gained a really rich understanding of the subtleties of my own body.

In the same way that I’ve developed the ability to place my fingers the soil and feel where a plant is about to come in before it’s visible to the eye, I’ve also developed the ability to know when I am going to ovulate and when I’m going to menstruate by paying attention to the more subtle cues in my body – things like my energy level, my thought patterns, and also the more private details of my body that suddenly are making me blush to talk about. I’m just not in the mood to talk about cervical mucus right now.

And yet, I have nothing to show for it… yet. 

So here’s my take. There’s a few things I’ve learned from my experiments growing daffodils and my experiments trying to become pregnant. These are the pieces of wisdom that I think are the most helpful that I would share with any new gardener, of plants or babies. The rest of the journey is yours.

I’ll start with the daffodils:

1. Bulbs, like seeds, have innate wisdom and are programmed to grow. That means that you don’t have to try that hard and most likely something will happen. They need soil, sun and water to grow. And in the case of fall bulbs, you only need to worry about the soil part. At least in the Northeast, the rest will take care of itself. Eventually the days will get longer and that little extra bit of sun will warm the soil just a tiny bit and then will tell something in the bulb, “wake up sleepyhead, it’s morning.” You don’t even have to water it. In fact – DON’T water it. If you do, you’ll run the risk of rotting it and then the whole game will come to an end. Just trust that the snow and the sleet and then the spring rains will water the ground just enough for things to begin on their own. Remember what I said – it’s an act of faith, a game of trust. You’re not needed for everything, just let them be and let yourself be delighted.

2. You don’t actually have to plant them as deep as the books and the blogs will tell you. They’ll say that you need to plant them 6 inches deep. And if you can, absolutely do it. But if you start planting and you start hitting a bunch of rocks and difficult earth, do your best. Around 4 inches will still work (probably). For sure, you need to make sure your bulbs are fully covered by a few inches so they are warm and protected. But if you don’t have the perfect 6 inch ditch for them but you really love the spot and think the tulips and daffodils will look great growing there, try it anyway. I did, and now I have the prettiest patches of flowers coming up in my favorite spots around the yard.
3. The “correct” time to plant bulbs, they say, is at least 6 weeks before the ground freezes. But if you procrastinated and it’s the middle of November and you’re like, “Shit, I really wanted to plant tulips but I think it might be too late” – see if you can still dig. If the ground is soft enough for you to dig, there’s still time. Again, ideally you want to do it earlier. But if you have to choose between waiting a whole extra year and taking the risk and going for it, I say go for it. I’ve planted about a week before Thanksgiving and it’s worked just fine. It’s just more work to dig that time of year.

4. When I was planting my sea of tulips, at first I was really worried about overcrowding them. The experts will tell you to plant them 2-3 inches apart. And despite my best intentions, this quickly seemed pretty impossible. This is partly because, see above #3, I waited too long to start so the earth was a little bit cold and harder to dig. And also, see above #2, once I got going I realized that the earth was really rocky and it was hard to get an even 6 inch canal where the bulbs would sit perfectly upright. Mine kept tipping over and so I kept them a little closer together so they leaned on each other and didn’t fall onto their side. This is not the correct way to do it, but still they grew. Having them point straight up towards the surface seems more important than having them spaced out evenly. Although, I will say that what I realized was that overcrowding them is kind of a waste of money because you plant twice as many and they get sort of hidden by the leaves of the ones that came up ahead. It’s a little bit like an eight year old kid with adult teeth growing in all kinds of directions. A little more space keeps the a bit more organized and nicer looking.

5. The other thing I learned is that having a sea of tulips is great, but once they are past, you are left with a sea of messy, sad leaves laying on the ground. The experts will tell you to leave them to compost into the soil to feed the plant. This would work if you had them within a garden bed of other perennials that will grow and cover them. But if you have just a tulip bed, it’s going to look nasty. So I cut them back and put fresh mulch to cover it. (And they still came back next year, no problem.) In the end, I had to give up the sea of tulips because I’ve added other flowers and plants to the beds so that the gardens look nice throughout the whole growing season instead of just one splash in early spring. My recommendation would be not to do a large dedicated tulip bed unless you have a large yard with lots of other planting spots that can take the spotlight later. If not, you’re better off doing a mixed bed with some pops of tulips and daffodils that welcome early spring and tide you over until the summer flowers arrive. I love a well-timed garden that blooms in waves from April – September.

Now let’s talk about babies:

1. If you’re a “maybe” when it comes to the question of whether or not you want a baby, I’m just going to throw this out there: maybe, in fact, you do know what you want, you’re just afraid to acknowledge it because you don’t see how it would all possibly come together. This was certainly true in my case. Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: It’s not going to come together, unless you first say yes. It’s a lot easier to figure out the answer to a problem that you first acknowledge you have.

2. If you’re a “maybe” or a “we’ll see how life works out” when it comes to babies, then do yourself a favor and don’t date men who don’t want a family. It sounds obvious, but some of us (ehem, me!) did not get this memo. It doesn’t always feel obvious, especially when you’ve got a fun man right in front of you who seems to think you’re amazing and you’re still young and feel like there’s still plenty of time to “see how life works out.” I’m sorry to tell you this, but if you stay with him “we’ll see how life works out” will turn into an answered question: his choice not yours. Isn’t the preferred path one you figure out together? At least find yourself a partner who is also a “maybe”. 

3. If you’re starting to think about getting pregnant, whether or not you have a partner, the best thing you can do for yourself is to get in touch with your ovulation. Get off hormonal birth control and experience your cycle with fresh unaltered eyes. Start by tracking your periods religiously and noticing your cervical mucus (ok, I guess I can’t help talking about cervical mucus today). Record it in a period tracking app and it will calculate your predicted ovulation. You can buy a big pack of ovulation tests and start testing 2-3 days before your predicted ovulation to discover when exactly you ovulate. Record it. When I first started trying to get pregnant, I was new to tracking my ovulation and, looking back, I’m not sure I was accurate the timing of those attempt truly were. And when you’re using donor sperm, that’s a costly and time-consuming mistake. If I could go back, I would start learning the in’s and out’s of my cycle way before I was ready to “start trying” so that I was actually prepared to make an honest go of it once I was ready.

4. If you are having difficulty getting pregnant on your own and want to start working with a clinic, research your options instead of just going with the clinic your physician refers you to. Look at the success rates of the clinics, read reviews, research the doctors. In your initial consult, ask questions about the doctor’s philosophy. There are lots of things to try before IVF. Unless you really want to do IVF, I would make an attempt to find a doctor who takes the time to review all the options for you instead of just pushing you to do IVF as step one. I’m not against IVF (I’m doing it myself) but it’s a big undertaking. I think it’s possible that if I had different support earlier on, I may have been able to become pregnant another way. Either way, you shouldn’t feel pressured to do IVF right away or be made to feel naive for wanting to try other options first (like nutritional changes, acupuncture, or even just good well-informed IUI attempts).

5. Keep your perspective on fertility vs. infertility. This one is subtle, but I think subtlety matters in the mind-body connection. How can you prepare your body, your mind, and your spirit to become fertile ground for new life? This is the path. Pursue that one.

These are my lessons that I’ve learned through trial and error. And if I’m being honest, I don’t regret the mistakes I’ve made. If I had known the things I learned about planting a sea of tulips, I may never have done it. And man, were they pretty that year.

And likewise, if I hadn’t lived all the stories I have to tell in Incredibly Wanted, I’d never be as sure as I am that this is the path for me. If it had been easy, if I had gotten pregnant on the first try, I’d never have the experience that I hope to have. Which is that one day, I’ll look my baby in the eye and say, “I’ve never tried harder at anything more than you.”