'My gratitude for my reliable birth control is followed by another sensation, a deep and profound empathy for every woman I know with children at home,' writes author Mary Pauline Lowry
Credit: Todd V. Wolfson; William Morrow
Picture this: After months of grief-induced anxiety that hasn’t responded to traditional treatment, I’ve made it to a neighborhood of lush rolling green hills on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, Calif. where psilocybin mushrooms have been decriminalized. I’ve spent the last few hours in a backyard temple tripping on 3.5 grams of psychedelic mushrooms sourced from a friend who lives nearby, and now I’m starting to come down from whatever cosmic place I’ve visited. I’m lying on a cozy mat, covered in blankets. I sit up, lift the mask covering my eyes.
“I think I’m back,” I say to the purple-haired priestess who has been watching over me in this temple, which is really a geodesic dome filled with crystals and singing bowls and a wall hanging of a phoenix rising from the ash.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“I can feel my IUD,” I say. This is surprising. Though the one-and-a-quarter inch, T-shaped piece of plastic has been in my uterus for years, I’ve never felt its presence. Now its outline inside me is clear as a Looney Tunes X-ray.
“How does it feel?” she asks.
How to explain? There’s a New Yorker cartoon called “The Adventures of Lady No-Kids” in which a worn-to-a-frazzle couple with a stroller — two bigger kids clinging to the mother’s arms — encounter a woman wearing underpants with a jacket and top hat. This jaunty Lady No-Kids gazes fondly at a stray goose. “Anyway,” she tells the wide-eyed couple, “I’m gonna follow this goose for a while and see where I end up.” My IUD is what has allowed me to be just like her, instead of like that exhausted woman. “It feels wonderful,” I say, and I mean it.
But my gratitude for my reliable birth control is followed by another sensation, a deep and profound empathy for every woman I know with children at home — close family members, dear friends — who’ve been pushed to the limit and beyond by the challenges of modern motherhood.
Credit: Todd V. Wolfson
I have spent countless hours listening to women I love talk about parenting during a pandemic, or through a major medical issue, or alone. About how isolated they feel, how lacking in critical support. About how working and raising kids makes it impossible to get enough sleep, much less make time for their own art. “I just feel so bad for moms,” I tell the priestess, then burst into tears. “It’s too much! They have so much responsibility. And not enough help!” I’m really sobbing now.
I didn’t initially come to that temple to weep about my stressed-out mom friends. I came because a series of career setbacks and personal losses left me with the condition every author dreads most. Whenever I opened my laptop and tried to drop into the creative flow, panic gripped me; my head filled with old-fashioned crackling TV static. I read that psilocybin can help people with trauma. But can it alleviate writer’s block?
That question, followed by much research, planning and preparation, led me to this moment, in which I wept, not about my writer’s block, but about maxed-out mothers everywhere. But the unconscious has its own logic, and so do my tears.
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I’ve always been empathetic, even porous, and back then, in the fall of 2022, when we were all trying to limp back to normal after the pandemic, my mom friends remained depleted, stressed, with too much to juggle and not enough time to recharge. When I met a group of them for “patio therapy” (AKA cocktails), one lamented that her daughter picked up every virus and bug ripping through her kindergarten classroom, bringing it home to the whole family. Another said tending to the needs of others had filled her with so much rage that she might actually explode.
A third told of hauling a son with special needs to an alphabet soup of therapies. She sighed. “I wanted these kids,” she said. “I wanted them with all my heart.” That was the rub. My friends didn’t just have children during a time when women had a choice, they’d all longed for and dreamed of babies. But now they were just so tired.
In that temple, I cried so hard for all mothers I wanted the moms in my life to have more time for sleep and their own creative endeavors, a magical fairy, babysitter or generous spouse to sometimes do dishes or take over prolonged bedtimes routines. But more than anything, I wanted them to have reliable, affordable childcare that couldn’t be ripped away simply because their kid had yet another morning of “loose stools.”
In the days that followed, I felt hopeful but unsure if the experience actually changed me. For a few hours, I’d seen the world in a different way. When I was tripping, all I felt for myself and the world was tenderness. When I considered all that I (and all humans!) had been through since March 2020, I felt a sense of distant marvel, like I was looking at Earth through a telescope.
And when I thought of my own parents, who had recently died within a year of each other, my dull grief was replaced with a detached sense of wonder. Once, I had parents, I thought, as if my life were the beginning of a fairy tale. The strangest thing was, from that expansive place, I literally could not think about my struggles as a writer. Maybe, in that mushroom-induced realm, my ego and drive did not exist. Or perhaps, floating in the creative cosmic river, it was impossible to imagine being cut off from the flow.
The next time I opened my laptop, I expected the return of that too-familiar panic. But it was gone. I began to type, tapping into my deep feelings of empathy and concern and love for all the mothers of young kids in my life. I wrote about a solo mother of 7-year-old twins who — after a rare night out with friends from her new pole dancing class — finds a dead man in her trunk, along with heaps of evidence pointing to herself as the guilty party.
Credit: William Morrow
Within weeks, it became clear that I was writing the novel that would eventually become Last Night Was Killer, a comedic thriller about a single-mom-slash-amateur-pole-dancer turned detective. My mushroom journey did more than melt my writer’s block; it unleashed my deep sympathy for mothers, and in doing so, gave me a subject for my novel — along with a mission.
I wanted to create a love song for every mother of young kids, to showcase the challenges they face, to take them on a fictional wild ride where they could make bad choices and do the ill-advised and sometimes very fun things they never actually get to do because they’re too busy making sandwiches and driving their kids to Mathnasium, too aware of how essential they are to their families and communities. I wanted to give them a well-deserved break and hopefully a chance to laugh really hard, to refill their cups so they have the energy to wake up in the morning and do it all for one more day.
The process of writing Last Night Was Killer changed my conversations with my mom friends, too. When I texted or called my mom friends, or met them for coffee, I found myself digging for mom metaphors and asking what household disasters make them laugh until they cry (or vice versa).
But in addition to offering a sympathetic ear to friends needing to talk about the tribulations of parenthood, I began asking about the upsides of motherhood, too. I wanted to learn what about motherhood brings them joy. My friends poured out the wild, unruly adoration they feel for their children, the small victories, the funny stories, too. One friend reported she had to make her son write an apology to a kid at school he purposefully offended. The apology note read: “Sorry I farted in your fort.” This willful, hilarious, troublemaking child is beyond my friend’s wildest dreams — she loves him so much.
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Another friend recounted the ins-and-outs of her 11-year-old’s baseball league, which provokes more political intrigue than a Hilary Mantel novel. My new understanding of the richer side of motherhood allowed me to inhabit my single-mom protagonist more fully, to write a better novel. It also sometimes gives me the pang of a road not traveled, experiences I’ll never have. But the pang doesn’t last long. Not having kids remains one of the greatest joys of my life.
Besides, every family needs a child-free auntie with lots of magic and extra bandwidth to help in a crisis. In my own family, I am that auntie. But as a Lady No-Kids, tending to others isn’t always my deepest calling. Sometimes, I just pull on my top hat and underpants and go off down my own quirky path, contentedly following that wandering goose.
Last Night Was Killer comes out July 7 and is available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.
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