Psilocybin… saved my marriage…
…if you’re a middle-aged-ish parent who finds themselves, consciously or subconsciously, deconstructing all the things society has taught us to value, while at the same time grappling with growing children who no longer look to us for all the answers and whom we can no longer protect from the social toxins that are seeping into their young and thirsty pores – well then, I believe my journey will speak to you all the more.
I saw women rising from the earth. I’d expected my immediate family to take center stage in my journey, but it was my ancestors who came to me first. Not just my ancestors, but my children’s ancestors – all of them with ample bosoms and sturdy outstretched arms. I saw the pain my multiracial children carry in their blood. African ancestors, ripped from their land; Cherokee ancestors, their land ripped from them; Jewish ancestors, fleeing persecution; European ancestors, seeking promise. I knew that my physical body, the one lying horizontally on the couch, was crying. I knew because I could hear my ragged breaths, and feel rivulets trickling down to my earlobes. I didn’t really cry, though – I wept. We cry over the pain we know we will pass; we weep over the pain that will live with us always. Yet braided through the tears was an overwhelming sense of serenity. It looked like sunbeams and felt like a womb. It held me, in a way I can’t imagine I’ve been held since those early days, when life is bewildering and sometimes uncomfortable, but also filled with milk and skin and song … my grandmothers and my great-aunts appeared to me, perhaps not entirely in focus, but I felt their presence and their mischief, their quiet and not-so-quiet ways of straining against the molds to which their mortal lives had been confined. My husband’s grandmother came to me with great clarity. She had my daughter’s wide smile and my son’s crooked teeth. I’d never had the opportunity to meet her in the flesh, but she was there with me that day. So was my husband’s mother, who rose from the ocean with the awe-inspiring magnificence of Urusla, mermaid Ariel’s nemesis, but minus all the evil. Instead, she was billowing and resplendent, radiating light and wisdom and love. My mother-in-law and her mother continued to weave themselves in and out of my journey. I hadn’t been expecting to see so much of them. My husband lost his grandmother, his second mother, when he was eight years old. His relationship with his mother has been a complicated one, pockmarked by periods of estrangement. My mother was there, frozen in a black and white photo, a laugh poised on her open lips. After my session, I sat in a park and pressed my palms into the grass. I spent that night and the following night at my husband’s apartment, grateful that I had some time alone to process.
Original Article (Your Tango):
Psilocybin therapy saved my marriage
Artwork Fair Use: edeliccenter
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