Next up in the trend of “normalizing” and “destigmatizing,” we have moms on mushrooms. Unfortunately, we’re not talking about mothers learning new cooking skills and introducing their children to shiitake and portobello for increased biodiversity and culinary enjoyment. Nope, this trend is about mommies microdosing psychedelics. But don’t worry, they’re natural!
Before anyone gets upset, it’s not as though anything wild is happening. Mom just keeps a little kitchen scale handy so she can microdose shrooms and speak publicly about it in states where they’re decriminalized.
Why would a mother desire such a mind-altering regimen? As microdosing evangelizer Tracey Tee explains, she had “gone into survival mode,” existing in a frayed and fragmented world of, you know, grocery shopping, making dinner, taking one child to lacrosse and another to ballet.
Here is where the unwarranted trope of mothers “in the trenches” gets a lot of traction. Mothers demand to be recognized for mundane, ever-present small sacrifices for the joy of family life. Somehow living with and teaching the people we have been given to love above all else is a source of PTSD from which they need rescuing. There is no denying that many mothers find the experience of caring for children to be traumatic. We shouldn’t ignore them or laugh at them (well, okay, maybe sometimes we can have a chuckle at someone’s expense). But we certainly shouldn’t accept such an abysmal state of the modern mother. Maybe drugging her up will do the trick?
It can be easy to pooh-pooh the complaints of an angst-filled suburban mother like Tee. This is but the latest instantiation of Betty Friedan reimagining a quiet life of comfort and possibility as the ninth circle of Hell. And yet, Tee has a legitimate complaint. Hers is a world without access to eternity. That sad lack of wonder in her world is evident by how overwhelmingly magical she found her first psychedelic.
Her daily life has, from her account, been chopped up into endlessly recurring sequences, segments of discrete time, always truncated, never with an expansive sense of all the time in the world and beyond. One early morning alarm followed by a carpool line, evening practice, and hasty dinner scarfed down followed by another.
The contrast between eternity, which is what we long for, and the present, the only place we currently have access to, sharpens our senses and allows us to live fully. The present is for us all that truly exists. Yet, the only worthwhile way of living requires a recognition of a kind of existence so far beyond merely the present moment, infinitely beyond.
Ah, but we must acknowledge in tones of awed gratitude that mothers make sacrifices for their children. It’s not as though Tee and the countless women like her are pursuing careers with punishing schedules. She is at the service of her children driving them to all the practices and appointments for their good. But is it good for them? No matter what lessons and trainings and mindfulness seminars we may drive our children to, the more fundamental lesson they learn with each trip around the sun is to be like us. What they are learning first is not ballet technique or healthy living but the drab, soul-crushing existence of always feeling beholden to the clock.
Aside from the possibility of irreversible psychosis, shrooms are a great option. Oh, except that entering an altered state means that mom has removed herself from the discomfort of her own life and loses all motivation to alter it. While Tee is emphatic that mushrooms are somehow different from the comically large wine glass that inspired a generation of alcoholic mothers or the little “happy pills” that got others through the day, they are not. She insists that mushrooms make her “present.”
But what she’s looking at are perhaps two sides of the same coin. While numbing ourselves with uppers or downers can be a cheap counterfeit of an eternal experience, slipping a smidge of magic mushroom in your morning cacao is a way of pretending to experience the present intensely while not altering anything about the overscheduled life that led you to seek refuge in an artificially enhanced world.
Some sports and activities are worth doing. By having a scheduled life, we can see the same people at the same time and grow both in skills and in the much more important deep and lasting bonds of friendship. However, when we sign up for and attend activities devoid of meaningful relationships, they are not serving the greater purpose and merely rob us of opportunities to experience fun, work, meaning, and the foretaste of eternity therein.
How do you know what to do? There is an easy litmus test: If you feel like you have to do shrooms just to get through the day, you are probably doing too much or doing activities devoid of meaning.
“Doing less” is not as simple as lazy inactivity. Instead, what is demanded of us for success is careful attention, conscious benign neglect, and a deep, joyful sense of purpose that we want our children to share with us as they grow. That is what moms on mushrooms are seeking, and they are unlikely to find it staring into a simulacrum.
