What mushrooms taught me about love, loss, and motherhood

Words by Kayli Howard

The very first time I felt my son inside me I was lying in a park outside of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Running my fingers through the fiercely green grass beneath me, I felt his limbs move within my womb, his heart beating below mine. I was electrified with love, but I wasn’t actually pregnant. I was on mushrooms.

At 23, I was still more than a decade away from even conceiving a baby. Back then, I’d only taken psychedelics a handful of times, yet often on journeys my mind went to my mom and her mom—both women with sharp emotional edges. That day outside of the museum, that was the first time I imagined becoming a mom myself. Although the idea excited me, I could sense seeds of self-doubt, watered through the generations, growing large within me too. On mushrooms, I remembered, for a little while at least, that a flawed relationship with oneself was at the root of my family’s sticky relationship with motherhood.

Growing up in the Northeast, in a revolving door of townhouse rentals, my mom was like a tea kettle that was perpetually boiling over. Emotional regulation was never the name of her game. When my dad first moved out, she had three kids between the ages of one to nine and zero chill. Her expressions were harsh, always harsh. Even in our framed family photos, it looks like she was chewing on rocks. After my parents’ ugly divorce came to a close, I reluctantly ended up in her custody. Hiding out in friendships, boys, and distant cities—I always strived to be everything that she was not.

At 26, I was living in Los Angeles, working in the film industry, when a friend invited me to a birthday party in the hippie haven of Topanga Canyon. Thirty, or so, of us young Hollywood creatives ate chocolate mushroom bars and frolicked around, pausing for intense heart-to-hearts beneath branches of eucalyptus trees. 

As the sun set, a gaggle of us girls were sitting together when the subject of motherhood came up. Contemplating one’s maternal lineage, I learned, was not my own psychedelic dilemma, but rather a universal theme that often arises under the medicine.

“Did you know that when a baby girl is born, she’s born with all the eggs she’ll ever have?” one of my friends floated to the group.

“No?!” we collectively shook our heads. Instinctually, our hands rested atop our fallopian tubes. 

One of the girls grabbed her phone to Google this supposed fact and it turned out to be true. She read aloud a quote from Layne Redmond, “… our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born...”

My mind went to my own grandmother. She was 16 when her mom died, then her father abandoned her. Living in Queens, New York, alone and desperate, she ended up in the arms of a married man who impregnated her. This schmuck made her get an under-the-table abortion. A few months later she met my grandfather and within six weeks she conceived my mom. All of her trauma? Unprocessed and alive within her during her pregnancy with my mom, and sadly until her death. 


Back then, in Topanga, I still desperately did not want to identify with the energy of my mother, or grandmother, yet I felt it. Survival mode was indeed the frequency I vibrated at.


Many moons and mushrooms later I met Niles. Despite the depth of our connection and the sturdiness of his character, in the early days of our relationship I was on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to discover the darkness behind my armor. He did, and chose me anyway.


Six years, one wedding, and a global pandemic later, we were under the sheets of a Manhattan Beach sublet when I felt a surge of certainty wash over me. With the salty sea breeze floating in from the sliding doors, I smiled, “Let’s make a baby,” and Niles agreed. 

When my period was late, I took a test and was baffled to see that it had actually worked—that is, until I started bleeding. Another four months passed before we felt ready to try again and lucky us, we saw two pink lines on the test once more. Nervous from the previous loss, I got my bloodwork tested right away, but by the time my second labs came back it was clear something was wrong.

“You’re miscarrying,” the midwife mistakenly told me. It wasn’t until three weeks later that I learned I was actually still pregnant, nine weeks along—but “not with a viable baby.” I was rushed to the emergency room with an ectopic pregnancy. Two nurses in full PPE injected me with needles, each nearly a ruler stick long on either side of my buttocks, filled with methotrexate, a form of chemo. 

Due to the harsh effects of the injection, we were benched from trying to conceive for three months. Which was a good thing since I now had a growing distrust in my body, a fear that it wasn’t meant to carry a baby. My family’s complicated relationship with motherhood was like a hot potato that had been passed down to me. It was now mine to hold in a way that I could no longer ignore

Now I thought of the soul-clenching anxiety that had overtaken my mom when I was a toddler. Both of my parents attributed that tidal wave of tension to the downfall of their marriage. In my early thirties I learned it was actually brought on by two back-to-back miscarriages. And I thought of the stories my Granny told me about her mother, a cold woman who had suffered nine losses—miscarriages and stillbirths—before becoming a mom herself.  

If I was blessed with my maternal lineage’s high cheekbones was I destined to carry their curses too? Unraveling, my mind gravitated further towards doubt about my worth, my womanhood, my faulty DNA.

For years the pattern of Niles and I trying and failing to create life persisted. There were late nights on Google, reading clinical studies, and conversations with strangers on Reddit who were stuck in the same childless inferno as me. There were fertility doctors and medicated cycles and eventually a pivot to IVF. 

Then, there were shots in my belly, in the middle of a farm-to-table dinner in the heat of summer. Shots in bathrooms of Christmas parties in Portland and restaurants in New York. Shots on New Year’s Day on the side of the road in Hawaii, my dress up and ass out. And blood work, so much blood work. Black and blue welts taking up residency in the crevice of my arms. 

Infertility is all consuming. Every moment, of every day, I felt I was operating at a loss. Finally, I decided to take a solo mushroom journey with an eyeshade and headphones, lying on a camping mattress on the floor of my office. Over the years I had learned, practiced, and shared with others the importance of entering a psychedelic experience with intention. On this journey I asked the mushrooms to help me understand what was holding me back from motherhood.

During this experience I was transported into my great-grandmother’s womb. I felt what it must have been like to be my Granny within it, and to be the egg that became my mom. Pulsing, red hot with tension, I was suffocated. 

My Granny was born in 1935 to a German Jew. I felt the pain, shame, and fear my great-grandmother had been carrying, along with the hurt from all nine of her losses that came before. I cried tears for all the women in my lineage, and beyond. For all the eggs in all the ovaries, vibrating to frequencies beyond their control.


After that journey, I began my morning meditation by holding space for my grandmother and great-grandmother. I imagined my open palms receiving theirs. I felt the fragility of their touch and shot warmth and sturdiness back into them. On mushrooms, I saw how their abrasive exteriors had been necessary. They protected against their shared wound, the one that I inherited. If I wanted to truly heal our familial pattern, I had to send my love inward so that it could radiate out, reaching generations before and beyond me.

By the day of my long-awaited embryo transfer, the cynicism I had been carrying evaporated. At six weeks along, Niles and I, in our sterile fertility doctor’s office, heard the miraculous beating of our son’s heart. I knew then I couldn’t carry the fear of loss with me, the story that it wouldn’t work out. I had to be at peace—I had to be peace. 


Maybe I would have arrived at motherhood without all the mushrooms, but I wouldn’t have the abundance of inner knowledge and compassion that they’ve granted me. Self-love, they showed me, is the prerequisite for easefully loving another. As a licensed psychedelic facilitator, I’ve since had the honor of sitting beside nearly two hundred individuals on their own psychedelic journeys. What I witness, time and time again, is the intergenerational core wound around love that so many of us hold. When we heal ourselves, and truly commit to learning how to love—and forgive—that healing extends to those in our orbit.


When my mom first came to meet her grandson, she marveled, over and over again, at my style of mothering. “You’re so calm,” she repeated, “So laid back as a mom.” And I watched as my cultivated chill gave her a greater mellowing out as well. With our sharp edges bending, we’re able to find our way closer to each other. Both of us lean back with greater ease, our ancestors resting on our shoulders. All of us appreciating the future evolving in the form of the smiling boy before us.

Kayli Howard is based in Portland, Oregon where she practices psilocybin-assisted therapy as one of the first Licensed Psilocybin Facilitators in the country. She is also a Marriage and Family Therapist Associate and co-founder of Numia Healing Center in Denver, Colorado. Follow her at @mindfeelrelease.