My Doctor Told Me to "Find a Man" If I Wanted to Be a Mom. Instead, I Took Up Gardening

I hadn’t given up on the Big Love, but my filter was finer. My healed heart had lost some of its naïveté, and I saw easily past men who did not suit me. Calluses and scars are made of similar stuff. Like my right hip, there’s a degree of torque my heart will no longer go, and when someone tries to push past it, intentionally or not, I move on easily.

Whether it was my emotional baggage, the men, or the city’s frenetic attention span affecting everyone in its orbit like a speeding metronome, meaningful relationships seemed more and more impossible to unearth and unlikely to last. I tried dating apps, but it felt completely wrong, misaligned with my instinct-led nature, my need to follow my nose.

I wanted to meet someone with whom I had a natural connection. I wanted to travel and talk about books and drink wine and eat out with someone I wanted to make out with. I wanted to make out with someone whom I wanted to wake up with, who wanted to wake up with me, and do so again and again. I never cared about getting married or a wedding, but I wanted to love someone enough to try to be a family—to try to have children together. Why was this person so seemingly impossible to find?

It’s not as if I was a homebody. I was at Mettā, a restaurant that I was involved with, and dining out in other restaurants often. But something had shifted. The New York I’d come of age in was all about being in a good room, a cool place, so you could see and meet like-minded people, see someone you like and find an excuse to start a conversation.

Restaurants had become my nightclubs, and so I expected them to offer opportunities to meet someone. But as I looked around, it felt like few people went out to meet new people anymore. In addition to much posing in order to post on social media, even at bustling, romantic bars with great lighting, I noticed people’s noses were always in their phones. Instead of catching my eye across a crowded, perfectly lit room and striking up a conversation, it seemed like everyone was hunting digitally for a soulmate or bedmate through the robotic addendum of their smartphones and dating apps and the algorithms that steered them. I need to feel someone’s energy to take an interest in them, and I didn’t feel anything—other than icky—on an app.

“What is wrong with me?” I lamented to my mother.

“I think it’s mostly bad luck,” my mother said in her quint- essentially caring, placating tone. “And you lost all those years as an actor, while all your friends were building careers and finding mates. You’re behind.”

Thanks, Mom.

Frustrated beyond measure but trying to avoid becoming embittered, I decided to try a new route. Proactively, I found a matchmaking agency that quietly let eligible women join the so-called “pool” of men for chump change. I wasn’t guaranteed a match, but I would likely be set up with men who had paid to be matched by “experts” and were guaranteed a certain number of dates. I went on three dates before I admitted defeat. Nothing about any of this romance hunting felt authentic, or romantic.

“It’s time to freeze your eggs,” a friend told me when I bemoaned my most recent dating fiasco to her.

“I’m 37,” I said. “So isn’t it past time for that?” “Honey, it can still work, but do it now,” she insisted. As I looked out the window of the doctor’s office while he recited his spiel somewhat absentmindedly, I could see my childhood apartment. I tried to psych myself up for the hormone protocol, the injections I’d give myself, the monitoring, the egg retrieval, all in the name of “time and peace of mind.”

I emptied my savings account, filled the prescriptions, and anxiously gave myself the injections in a pinch of my belly, standing alone in my childhood kitchen. When I went in for the fateful visit during which they checked to see how many follicles had grown into eggs, the doctor found only two, but they didn’t tell me that at the time. My phone rang later, while I was in a meeting at Mettā, and I rushed into the January cold to take the call.

“Hi, is this Taray-gia? This is Dr. Fines calling from Manhattan Fertility.”

“This is Tarajia, yes, hi.”

“Hi, I’m just calling to say that we’ve canceled the rest of your fertility treatment for this cycle.”

“Why?” I asked, baffled.

“Well, we’ve looked at the reports from your monitoring visit this morning, and we see that only one, maybe two, good follicles are developing into an egg, so it’s basically the same as a regular cycle for you. We won’t perform an extraction for just one egg.”

I’d wandered down Adelphi Street and suddenly thought I might be sick into the stoop planter of one of the pretty brownstones.

“I don’t understand,” I said mostly to myself. “Wait, who are you again? You’re not my doctor.”

“No, um, ma’am, Dr. Smith is out of office today, so I just wanted to give you a call to let you know that you don’t need to continue with the injections.”

“Shouldn’t my doctor make this decision?” I asked, belligerent. I’d met him only once, but still, wasn’t there some protocol, or was I just a cog?

“Well, it’s a group practice, we work as a team, and Dr. Smith was notified of your outcomes. I’ll connect you to reception, who can help you schedule a follow-up with him.”

When I finally got an appointment a couple of weeks later with Dr. Smith, he was unsentimental.

“You could do another round,” he said noncommittally while shuffling papers on his desk. “But with results like these, and if it’s a stretch financially, I won’t encourage it. And it’s important to remember that IVF is the same protocol, so don’t wait to meet someone a few years from now thinking you can do IVF together. It’s not likely to work for you, if this hasn’t.”

I tried to contain my fury. I stared out his window toward my apartment in the middle distance.

“I guess I just don’t understand,” I said stupidly.

“In a small percentage of women, this happens. Their bodies simply don’t respond to the drugs the way most women do. Look, it’s not impossible for you to get pregnant. You ovulate. Start trying to make a baby with a man. But you’re not a good candidate for egg freezing or IVF.”

“Doctor, if there was a man with whom I wanted to make a baby, then excuse me, but we would not be having this conversation.”

“Well, go find him!” he said, as if it were as easy as finding a stone to skip on a rocky beach or a dandelion to wish upon in a spring field. I wanted to spit in his face.

How could my body betray me like this? How could my body be unwilling to give my heart the thing it most wanted: love, the love of a child, family? The grief I experienced was debilitating, such that I spent weeks retreating to my bed, blinds drawn, eyes covered, not sleeping, not crying exactly, but sort of leaking tears in a liminal state, like a frog whose body half freezes in a frozen pond, alive but not exactly living. What made it infinitely worse was that I’d suspected this outcome. I’d never been pregnant, not once.

In all my years with boyfriends who “pulled out” or with whom I practiced the notoriously faulty rhythm method, this prognosis confirmed what I’d always suspected: I wasn’t fertile. My mother had miscarried in all pregnancies that followed me; her siblings never had kids. This diagnosis, for all its cruel pain and disappointment, made sense. It also perfectly dovetailed with my wretched theory that I Cannot Have or Keep the Things I Most Want. Despite my extreme privilege, when it comes to what matters most, matters of the heart, I was, for lack of a better term, cursed. The problem must have been me—be it my outlook, my body, or my fate, I was the issue. I was the consistent variable. I was the broken constant.

I refused to sink to the fatalism that had plagued me pre-Uruguay. I knew I had to soldier on. That I could and would find that strength. But I also knew I desperately needed love in my life—not necessarily romantic love, but the superpower that is loving someone other than oneself.

Maybe I’ll meet someone and adopt, I told myself, attempting to come to terms with the fact that I would not be a parent to a child from my body. Maybe someday I’ll adopt on my own, when I have more means to support a child.

“I bet you’ll meet someone who is divorced, who has kids you’ll fall in love with,” my mother said.

“You will be a mother,” Daphne, Grace, Lou, and nearly all my friends said, almost unanimously, full of empathy.

As I usually do in times of distress, I felt a pull toward nature. When there was a hint of spring in the air, and the scent of earth on the wind in the city, I decided that it was time to cast aside my fears and to teach myself to garden, even if the outcome was imperfect. The wraparound terrace was the main feature of the apartment, and I began to imagine the oasis I could create there for myself, on my own, in my glorious and original tower.

The garden of my youth was long gone, deserted gradually as my parents had made a sanctuary for themselves upstate, where roots were welcomed deep into the earth and pots were only for the geraniums that were brought inside to winter. In a final blow to the urban terrace’s long-ago grandeur, the landlord had vanquished most of our remaining stubborn trees and decaying old vessels. The lovely Siena tiles with moss between them that had cooled my youthful feet in summer had been ripped out and replaced with bland gray concrete slabs. All our pots were confiscated, though for years they’d held only sad elegies of life: a persistent beach rose shrub that refused to die or to flower; the rotted roots of an old birch that gave up a decade before; a feral bonsai. When I reluctantly returned to my childhood home, the terrace was once again a blank canvas, as it had been when my mother arrived in ’73. Consciously or not, I’d been waiting for a partner to guide me in my garden, someone to carry heavy bags of earth, someone to cook dinners for and eat with under the awning in summer, as my parents had. So, as in all things that have eventually brought me the most satisfaction and joy, I learned by doing; I taught myself. My dad asked his former team at the Morrell & Company warehouse to put aside Bordeaux boxes and drop them off whenever they were doing deliveries nearby. I carted earth from supply stores and young juniper shrubs from the farmers’ market. I ordered Japanese grasses and planted them beneath the big picture window that I looked out upon from my writing desk, and they whispered to me as I typed.

A cluster of spiderworts, one of the only things to survive from my childhood, flourished in an old steel basin, its purple flowers greeting me in the mornings between long verdant reeds. In an old terra-cotta planter that my dad had affixed to the brick wall in the 1970s, a stubborn succulent stem remained, prehistoric, leafless, but not lifeless. I replanted that stub, and its silvery leaves and stems spanned a foot by the end of the season. I buried dahlia bulbs, and though it seemed impossible that the brown tubers could amount to much, their shoots poked through the earth to greet the sunshine and grew to shoulder height.

I wanted wildness that would wave in the breeze, and so I experimented with seeds, literally laughing at the notion that I could put these tiny particles in the soil and that something might occur. For days, I watered the seemingly barren earth and laughed harder still when, sure enough, little green shoots appeared. I sprinkled zinnia and cosmos seeds that shot up quickly, adorably, mocking me in my skepticism. Their seed packages told me to “thin” them when they were two inches tall, but, as ever, I found pruning difficult. I’ve always struggled to take away, to make room for something I can’t yet see, for things without proof or guarantees.

In the flotsam of the overstuffed bookshelves, I found a book from the 1970s on organic urban gardening and followed its instructions for a shortcut to composting. I liquefied my vegetable scraps and fed this superfood smoothie to my tiny tomato seedlings, and they doubled in size in days. In early July, the first fruit began to color. My lone clematis vine flourished, as did my profuse herb garden, and these things together, these small predictable and yet implausible acts of nature, made a believer of me.

I was nostalgic for the garden of my youth, abundant and harlequin, but liked my predominantly green version. Simple as my plot remained, it obsessed me. I walked through it 10 times a day and worried about it when I spent a night away. I looked for old urns in junk shops and considered making a little grotto out of seashells. I carried home an old, discarded marble slab from the curb and turned it into a bench seat. I watered each plant according to the way it liked best. I fell asleep thinking of how I could improve upon it the next year.

I asked myself what was missing from the garden, and the answer was not another boxwood, a quince arbor, or a new red maple, though those, too, would’ve been nice. What was persistently missing was a person, a partner who remained a chimera, the laughter of an unknown child.

“Tarajia, can you water the garden, please, while I get dinner going?” my mother almost always instructed when we returned from upstate on Sunday evenings to a parched terrace. As a young girl, I’d come to expect that part of the routine. “And please Windex the table before you set it so we can have dinner out there.” And back out I would go to finish the job. When the blooms came in, my mother picked violets, wrapped their tender stems in damp paper towels, and sent them to school with me to give to my teachers.

I desperately wanted a descendant to dream in my garden, to water it when the sun began to set while I prepared supper, to pick its raspberries, to trap its centipedes. I swallowed my sadness and looked across the river at the Pepsi-Cola sign, then back down to my herbal babies. The garden teased me again for my loneliness, whispering to have a bit of faith. Some forces, like the seeds, would make things come, whether I believed in them or not.

Excerpted from Desire Feeds the Feast: A Memoir, published by Zibby Publishing. Copyright © 2026 by Tarajia Morrell.