“Any last questions before we start your IVF cycle?” my fertility doctor asked. I fiddled with my crescent moon necklace and scribbled a few notes onto the back of an envelope.
We ended the Zoom call, and I immediately consulted my Honeycomb astrology calendar, a spiral-bound notebook that tells me what the planets are up to. It was hidden the whole time on my lap, lest my doctor discover that his patient followed the stars the way he tracked my hormone levels.
I check my astrology calendar every morning, the way my partner, Andrew, scans the headlines in three newspapers. I’ve been into astrology ever since I went through my divorce seven years ago. To this day, I find comfort in the rhythms of planetary cycles and consider my astrology chart a road map for my life. I use it to take action. I might pitch an essay to a publication if lucky planet Jupiter is talking to creative goddess Venus. I’ll carve out time to meditate if rigorous taskmaster Saturn is in a Debbie Downer mood. Doing so makes me feel like I have more control over my future. (I have three planets in Virgo. What can I say? I’m a detail freak.)
Sometimes I’ll circle important dates in my astrology calendar, a habit I’ve often thought I’ve inherited from my father, a lifelong gambler who marks up his horse-racing forms in the same fashion. I wish he knew his birth time so I could do his astrology chart with more accuracy. As he likes to say: “If I knew it, I’d be playing it in the lottery.”
Although my dad didn’t like the odds of egg-freezing, he still bet on me and helped with the cost in the middle of my divorce so that I could do in vitro fertilization in the first place, which bought me more time to figure out my life.
Trying to get pregnant only deepened my interest in astrology. I discovered there is quite a bit of overlap between IVF and looking to the cosmo for signs or answers. In both, timing is everything. Ovulation occurs only at a certain time every month, and in IVF you have to take your medications at the same time every day. It’s the same in astrology. When planets align, you’ve got a window to make something happen. As it turned out, both were about to happen for me at the same time in a really big way.
When I was learning astrology, my mentor taught me to think about planetary movements in terms of stories: Whatever was occurring in my astrology chart would manifest somehow in my life. And as it turned out, at the time Andrew and I were going to…
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