I was supposed to be pregnant in April. That was the plan, at least, contingent upon many factors: the loan for our in-vitro fertilization treatment coming through, my husband’s sperm retrieval, the shots and hormones, my uterine lining thickening and the embryos made in a petri dish blossoming and implanting and deciding to stay. Using IVF to get pregnant was never my first choice of course, but I’d come to be comforted by the sureness of its clinical planning – until March 2020 put a pause in those carefully charted plans. The world seemed to shut down around us like lights on a stage, one after the other. Along with my dentist appointment and my haircut, the fertility treatments we’d scheduled were suddenly deemed elective, and the clinic closed indefinitely.

I kept reminding myself I was lucky: lucky to have a job I could do from home, to have a house full of food and company, lucky for my health. But it didn’t feel lucky to have to wait for something I’d planned and saved for, and wanted so badly. IVF may have been elective, but it felt essential to me.

Locked down and waiting, the house became my universe, and I turned my attention to domestic matters long neglected, like my houseplants. They were a rag tag crew I was surprised to find alive: a flowering cactus, its leggy stems stretched up noodle-like, capped with blooming heads that pressed against the window screen like refugees. An ancient, crusty aloe plant I’d rescued from my office, which had a lizard-like claw hanging down below its outgrown pot. One plant caught my eye the most – a stout green-leaved house plant, its round, glossy leaves in a playful spray. I couldn’t remember where I’d gotten it, but, forgotten in a corner of the patio all summer, it had quietly thrived. More than this, it had begun to multiply, with dozens of miniatures sprouting from the soil and in tinier versions from its stems.

An internet search told me my multiplying plant was a pilea peperomioides, also known as the Chinese money plant, because of its coin-like round leaves. Originating in China centuries ago, the story goes that it crossed borders in 1946 by way of a Norwegian missionary to China. Expelled from the country when Chairman Mao ordered foreigners and any marker of religion out of China, the Norwegian took a pilea seedling with him back home and shared its offspring with family and friends. Pilea pups spread around Europe, becoming a symbol of friendship. Easy to care for, quirky and stylish, it started appearing stateside in the early 2010s, a home horticulture darling.

So my pilea plant was a mom. I loved her for that. I decided to propagate my own crop of pileas, watched video tutorials and read plant blogs, learning the best ways to multiply plants. I learned that it was a simple process, but not a guaranteed one. Sprouts that are around 2 inches tall can be plucked from their source, either by carefully digging out their root system from the soil or clipping the pup right from the stem. After drying the root for a day or so, the pups can be placed in water for 2-3 weeks until they sprout their own root system, then are planted in their own soil to grow to adulthood. In the fast-but-terribly-slow time of early quarantine, checking my seedlings’ root development every day became a needed daily ritual. I took to obsessively checking if any seedlings were big enough to pluck, hoarding small containers to grow new plants in, mini jars and shot glasses. One day I’d spot a shiny leg pulsing out of the roots, translucent like cooked onions. Every day, without my seeing, the legs would grow, until they were a web that stretched long enough to support itself in soil. Through daily trial and error, I started a new crop of pilea plants in the window sills of my kitchen.

Meanwhile, life marched on. The fertility clinic remained closed indefinitely, and we realized the lockdown didn’t have an end in sight. Family members caught the virus, some spending time in the hospital. I watched my friends’ babies become toddlers on Instagram, met newborns over Zoom. I deleted and reinstalled the apps over and over again.

I obsessively read about IVF procedures, joined a Facebook group where women rattled off their hormone levels and follicle counts and egg numbers. They celebrated success and tallied failures and losses. Everyone used felt letter boards with pithy sayings to document their journeys – a trend I always thought was odd, forcing cheer onto a grueling, clinical process, a deeply personal and particular experience reduced to a kind of meme. They posted photos of their home pregnancy tests showing faint lines or stark white empty boxes, wanting feedback and comfort. Occasionally a post would announce a member leaving the group after too many losses. “I’m out,” was the phrase everyone used when they learned they were not pregnant. Elsewhere online, women I knew publicly posted about suffering miscarriages, one at 7 weeks, two stillborn at nearly 9 months. I had terrible anxious dreams: children dying in a toxic pool, taking care of a kitten in a busy train station, people dying of COVID behind sheets of plastic, of pilea pups sprouting from my legs and arms.

My pilea plant experiment continued. Some plants grew and thrived, to my amazement, into plant toddlers themselves, then miniatures of the mother plants. But some seedlings never developed roots in their water. Others rotted or their leaves turned yellow. I’d tried to propagate others too young, and they shriveled. I left one of my successful propagated plants outside and when a thunderstorm rolled in, it fell to the ground and smashed, dead. It didn’t help that the pot I’d planted it in had a face.

The pilea minis slowed their growth when it turned colder, right around the time I was allowed to start my IVF cycle. Like the process with the plants, IVF was full of trials and missteps and heartbreak. The basics of IVF depend on the fertility issue, but my and my husband’s went like this: he had his sperm retrieved from his testicles and frozen in vials. My ovaries were stimulated with a cocktail of hormones to release a larger number of eggs than normal, then the eggs were retrieved from my ovaries surgically, and the sperm and eggs were put together in a lab to create embryos. An embryo would then be placed in my uterus in the hopes that it would implant and become a baby.

The first IVF baby was born in 1978, but doctors were tinkering with in-vitro processes as early as the 1800s, much like the pilea plants that had been growing for centuries in China before reaching me in 2020. The process itself is incredibly physical and full of unpleasant effects. The sperm retrieval for my husband was a simple procedure, but a painful and delicate one that left him scarred and fragile for a week or so as I tried to comfort him. The weeks of shots I gave myself each day into the fat of my stomach left me groggy, emotional, nauseous and tired, as my ovaries swelled unnaturally like raisins soaked in water, my stomach distended and tender. The egg retrieval procedure was also a bloated and crampy recovery. Happily, it yielded 32 eggs, a successful harvest. After days in the lab with my husband’s sperm, though, only four embryos survived, to be stored in a lab and monitored. Once an embryo has been developing in the lab for five days, the hope is that it becomes a blastocyst, a full-grown embryo ready to be implanted. But sometimes they don’t grow in the petri dishes, their cells don’t multiply the way they should. I remember the sheepishness I thought I detected in the nurse’s voice when she told me the news – that only two embryos had survived past the three-day mark, and the rest had been discarded. I thought of my pilea plants with the stilled stems, rotted and rootless, the ones with the yellow or blackened leaves, how it was hard to throw away their dried and gnarled corpses though I knew they were dead.

A few days after the embryo transfer, I took a walk in the woods and imagined myself a loving, fertile ground, prayed to god and the forest for the babies to take root, promised them that it would be a happy home. In the days after I searched for signs everywhere, in the four-leaf clover I found out of season while walking my dog, the fairy ring of mushrooms that sprouted up in our suburban neighborhood near the golf course. In the light of hoping for the conception – so mundane it happens all the time, often against our will – everything became sacred.

I’ve whispered countless prayers into the sky in the past year. As in gardening and in biology, hope and luck seem to be of equal importance to the mystery of conception. Things look so different now than they did a year ago. I no longer believe in any definitive end to the pandemic or this era, our lives marred and scarred by the changes we’ve weathered over the last year. I also think there isn’t a definitive end to a “pregnancy journey” like mine. Once you set into motion something living, you’ve begun a process that goes on even once you leave it, even if you neglect it. Even if death occurs, the imprint of life remains as a memory. Even when we are dormant, we are expectant.

One day in late summer I had been tinkering with my pileas when I noticed the mother plant was looking leggy, starved for sun. In haste, I lobbed off the top part of the plant to propagate her, only to learn later in a panic that the stems were only stretching because of their age, and I’d likely killed my mother plant, the one who had given me so many new plants. Luckily, that plant did survive after all, grew new roots, hearty as ever in a new pot. In the dead of winter, when all growth seems impossible, I put her in my daughter’s nursery, which gets the best light in the house – a reminder of life, but also death, and near-death, of growth, but also the waiting, the tending, and the longing. We’re still toying with names for the baby – she is due in July – but I decided I needed a name for the pilea. I named her Lucky.