Mommies Who Mushroom

Thomas Albdorf

When I arrive at Vanessa Panzella-Velez’s fifth-floor apartment in Brooklyn on a blue-sky morning in January, she’s already taken drugs: one third of a gram of magic mushrooms. A pouch of tan capsules sits on the table—like vitamins, except powdered psychedelics.

Not that you’d know. There are none of the stereotypical signs: no trippy hallucinations or bodies writhing around like you’re looking in a fun-house mirror. Instead, there’s Vanessa, 38, a freelance social-media manager, welcoming me inside with the offer of a warm drink, cacao with almond milk in a bowl-size mug. She’s used maple syrup to sweeten it, not honey. “Is that okay?” It’s been a busy morning, between trying to fix the internet and schlepping her puppy, Cookie, to the dog park in near-zero temperatures. Later, she tells me, she has plans to help her 11-year-old stepson with his schoolwork, which includes finishing up a woodworking project and studying mixed fractions for math. That night, she’s going to a birthday party for her niece. To put it another way: Vanessa is not high. Getting high is not the point. Vanessa and her husband, Danny, 45—her stepson’s father, who is present during my visit and also on one third of a gram of magic mushrooms—have recently begun to microdose with psychedelics two or three times a week every few months. In the past, they’ve taken higher doses when they’ve needed to work through something bigger, like a communication issue. It’s a practice they say has completely transformed their relationship while radically improving their parenting.

This is a time of psychedelic renaissance, of mushroom mania. It’s a time when people are increasingly turning to psychedelics not for recreation but for healing—and many of them are parents.

It makes sense; perhaps no one is more in need of a mental-health salve. Because while parenthood is often billed as the ultimate blissed-out euphoria, for many it is where the hemorrhaging of happiness happens. It’s a sleep-deprived, tedious, anxiety- riddled road, recently made all the more difficult by the pandemic. Worn down by the malaise of modern parenting, burdened by the traumas they’ve inherited from their own parents, or disillusioned with a mental-health-care system they feel has failed them, some parents have found an answer in psychedelic substances.

A few years ago, Vanessa and Danny were in a rut. Their relationship was up and down. As a stepparent, Vanessa says, she had a lot of insecurities, especially as she struggled to get pregnant herself. Parenthood made her feel resentful, frustrated, depressed—none of the things she thought it would. She began to put up walls between herself and her stepson.

Vanessa and Danny had already tried counseling when a friend suggested psychedelics. At first, Vanessa was unsure. She had never smoked weed, not even one time. Danny was more open, but his…