My neighborhood in Brooklyn is one of those gentrified places where all you see are strollers, moms and dads chartering their kids around on electric bikes or even babies occupying seats at the local dive bar. At least that’s all I see now, given that, over the past four years, I’ve learned that I cannot have my own children.

This knowledge was acquired slowly, as hope diminished and the pressures of science, time and money became increasingly harder to ignore in the face of failed reproductive treatments. These neighborhood babies taunt me, they show me the mistakes I’ve made. This aspect of my life hasn’t gone as planned, and I’ve since learned there are rules you have to follow that I’ve come to late in the game.

My only option would be to buy an embryo and implant it in my uterus, if I decided that I wanted to give birth, which I did. But emotionally, I needed to erase my disbelief at losing my right to “real” motherhood while stepping into à la carte motherhood, which felt scary and selfish. Taking ayahuasca to decide if I should become this person who would go to any lengths to have a baby seemed like a solid solution to assuage my guilt and put me on the right path. It was tangible, something I could point at, maybe a way to outsource my decision. Wild, untraditional methods to achieve my wants and desires have always been right up my alley. I’ve lived in a van, backpacked the world on my own for years, changed careers and countries at the drop of a dime. Not going after what I wanted was never an option.

So, an ayahuasca retreat would be a way to fast-track the yes or no of gestating another set of people’s frozen cells. I had already undergone seven unsuccessful IVFs and even more IUIs to try to conceive, approaching those with unfailing determination to preserve my genetic legacy. Of course, I would have preferred to fall in love and have a baby with a partner, raise children the way I was raised. I didn’t so much want this as I just expected it would happen one day. Single in my late 30s, the idea of donor sperm came to mind, then action, then fixation. I spent years poking my body with needles to achieve something that wasn’t in my genetic playing cards; I had bad eggs. 

I was very accustomed to my doctor’s phone calls a few days after egg retrieval, his office number popping up again and again on my cell, informing me of my lack of success, always moving on to the next step, always encouraging positive thinking. The last time he’d ever call me, he told me the one egg they had retrieved and fertilized didn’t make it past day three. It just died. I hung up the phone, feeling sad and confused, uncertain if I truly believed it was over.

At age 42, I just stopped, but my mind remained in limbo. Not quite grieving and not quite accepting, not knowing if this was a blessing somehow, not to be able to have kids, or even what I really wanted the rest of my life to look like. I thought about my mom and the deathbed promise I made to her a few years earlier that I’d have children. Would she have accepted a child bought via an agency as one of her own? Should I frankenstein a baby into existence for the purpose of fulfilling what I thought I was owed, so that I’m never alone? 

I never thought I’d get here. All those years ago, when I first started IVF, I told myself I’d quit the path to motherhood if I found that I could no longer use my body, but I’m not sure why. Is it the shame of questioning whether I would somehow be “less than” for not sharing my baby’s genes? I know I need to let myself grieve the loss of genetic children, but I’m wondering if the grief will ever truly go away and if it’s right for a child to enter our world with me questioning the unquestionable mother-child bond.

I thought ayahuasca might just be the miracle drug I needed to clear my mind of its fog and negative beliefs. I had met a handful of people who had tried it, and none left without a deeply profound experience. Thus, I hoped it would shatter my ego for a few hours, show me answers to questions I didn’t even know I should be asking. Maybe I secretly wished that it would just grant me acceptance, and that would mean I don’t need to have children and I could stop asking. The path of least resistance would be not to do anything at all. But whenever I considered that option, a voice in my head would scream regret! And so I continue.

As a sceptic, my expectations were all over the place, but I felt I had no other options to get past my bottleneck. In addition to wanting answers, I wanted to be cured of my sugar “addiction”, to be nicer to people, to not drink coffee first thing in the morning, to stop depending on melatonin to sleep every night. I wanted to see the universe from the beginning till the end of time, and understand that my speck of an existence doesn’t matter, my having a baby certainly doesn’t matter. I wanted to see another life, one where I’d have a baby, and think: who cares about this life where I don’t have one? 

But knowing what I knew about myself, I anticipated a deeply uncomfortable, even scary, trip, with a heavy dose of paranoia. It's just another hallucinogen at the end of the day, right? I’ve never been super in touch with my body and my heart, so who knows if I’d even get answers about my baby quandary specifically. Or, what if I got answers, but they weren’t the ones I wanted to hear? What then?

What I didn’t expect was how an answer would come from what didn't happen.

⁂

Six months before I tried ayahuasca, I went to Guatemala and visited Lake Atitlán. Sitting in the courtyard of a grassy restaurant by the water, early in the morning before most tourists were up, I met Hannah, who also lived in Brooklyn and was around my age. One look at her long skirt, crystal necklaces and general smiling demeanor made me think she could help me somehow. She definitely had what I wanted. I learned her happy appearance stemmed deeply from her exploration of traditional medicines. I brought up ayahuasca as we sat at breakfast, exploring her eyes for clues. She said her favorite exercise was just with breath work, and this made her sound credible. 

Several months later, I reached out to her to find out more, and she had, coincidentally, just finished her first ayahuasca ceremonies in Cusco, Peru, with shamans she would soon put me in touch with. It was all coming together; instead of high-priced retreats in Costa Rica, I had the best-in-class shamans in the sacred valleys of Peru waiting for me over my Christmas break. A quick and pleasant exchange with one of them on WhatsApp led to us confirming the price and itinerary (I would be able to do two rounds), what I was to bring, and, of course, my pre-trip “dieta” regimen. 

I informed my therapist, consulted my psychiatrist. Both were on board, though my psychiatrist’s enthusiasm caught me off guard as he hadn’t seemed particularly down with “new age” medicines. I weaned off Vyvance, an amphetamine, and Prozac and Abilify (which I had been on for a year since my difficult period). I stopped drinking coffee, cold-turkeyed my cigarette habit. 

I felt rewarded by the hardship of the ayahuasca dieta; optimistic that these sacrifices would come naturally on the other side of the ceremony. I’d gladly forgo my five cups of coffee per day for a fancy bag of tea. I’d eat more lentils. I’d keep fresh herbs on my kitchen counter. These fantasies catapulted me forward while some part of me braced for collapse.

A year before my Peru trip, I lost my mind during my aforementioned period of difficulty. That’s the only way I can describe it. These relapses into deep depression and anxiety happen to me every handful of years, often due to a mix of heartbreak and existential dread. This time it was the classic story: I met a guy, and he had liked me back, until he didn’t. At the same time, my dad told me he had developed a new cancer in his bladder, and I was fighting with both my brothers. I was alone, and all this time, I was desperately trying to have a baby, and it wasn’t working. So this guy I met, I thought he could save me. Thought he was the answer. He said he’d help me have the child that hadn’t yet come. When he pulled away, as my 42nd birthday was around the corner, I thought my life was over. I stopped eating, became stick thin, and figured I’d roam the earth full of deep sadness for the rest of my days. 

During this downward spiral, I went to Mexico for my annual solo Christmas trip I’d kept up since my mom had died. There, I bought xanax, cocaine and ecstasy. I slept a lot during the days thanks to the xanax, woozily starting conversations in my hostels and bus stations, telling people how I was in AA and sorry I couldn’t share a drink with them. They looked at me questioningly, as it was clear I was on something. Oh, let me explain: I don’t have a drug problem, I have an alcohol problem, so it’s ok that I take drugs recreationally from time to time. As I said, I’m sober. Sober as a dog.

Thankfully, things slowly got better when I returned from Mexico. I gained all the weight back and more, got on prescription medications, came clean at AA and with my sponsor, and therefore restarted my day count, losing the 2.5 years of sobriety I thought I had. With this supposed spiritual honesty under my belt, I wanted to know how, after Peru, I’d live out the rest of my days: either with a child or alone. This was becoming a do-or-die situation, and I shuddered at the thought of my answer not being laid flat at my feet, magical-thinking or not. So I committed to it being the right answer, since it would have to be the universe’s (ayahuasca’s) decision for me and my reward for leaning in so hard to the magic. 

I’ve always had body issues. In Peru, I enjoyed the subtle, then more noticeable, weight loss I experienced from the dieta. My stomach shrank during the days of fasting, and I slinked my body around in my dorm bed, fascinated by its sharpness. I’d have good pictures on my last day in Peru when I would climb Machu Picchu and pose for iconic photos with the Andes as my backdrop. I could use these photos in my dating app profiles. And I did. And I am.

My shamans said they’d pick me up from my hostel, and we’d go to an ancient, traditional site in nature and sleep in a cave during the ritual. I learned it would just be them and me. I learned this wasn’t a retreat, per se, but more of an ad hoc outing. 

As we settled into the cave on Christmas night, we started what I guess is the process of an ayahuasca ceremony. They set up camp, placing my sleeping bag in the middle of the tarp at the cave’s entrance, with the two shamans, both probably 8-10 years younger than I am, taking up just one half of the surrounding space. It seemed I was supposed to be in the center. But this allowed them to be positioned against the rocks at the edge of the tarp, whilst I had to sit up straight on my sleeping pad, without back support. This was the first error in my mental checklist. I couldn’t relax, my back and body were the focus of my mind.

They sang, we poured liquids into the ground, we chewed coca leaves, which gave me a mild stimulating feeling, but nothing more. They took my pulse, which has always been pretty low. We talked, and it wasn’t very awkward. 

There was a lead shaman, the one I texted with, who had an attractive, somber face and was well-dressed in a leather jacket with tassels. His long black hair hung down to his butt. He was shorter than me, but the other one was much taller and goofier. Both mentioned having daughters. The lead shaman told me about the history of ayahuasca, about society being out of touch with its true purpose. I stared up at the night sky, trying to picture women in traditional clothing making the medicine. Then, he asked me about my intentions.

I shifted on my sleeping bag, feeling unprepared, still looking out at the horizon. I brought up just wanting to be happy. I backed up, started with my mother’s death and what was left of my family. I held back tears talking about being single for the vast majority of my adult life, then pivoted to my IVFs and being infertile but still wanting a child. On the eve of my 43rd birthday, the decision to pursue a nonlinear path to motherhood through a non-genetic child was my only option, and it tortured me. Was it the right decision? Some call this embryo “adoption” in the fertility industry, which makes it sound very significant.

This is when the shaman started talking about plant medicine that could cure my infertility, that Western medicine was what failed me, and that having a baby the old-fashioned way was still possible. Ayahuasca would set me straight. He said women in Peru have kids all the time at 43.

I began to heat up. I heard myself responding before I knew where I was going with my words. This type of conversation comes up often when I share with strangers that I can’t have kids. They will think of someone they once met or heard of who had kids at an older age, and apply this to my situation now. Though conflict was not supposed to be part of this experience, I was still me—argumentative and sincere in my convictions. The shamans weren’t supposed to be taking me back to this option. They were answering the wrong question with the wrong answer—they were supposed to shepherd me through my final decision on embryo adoption and make it stick. 

I must have sounded bitter, telling them how it just doesn’t work for all women, no matter what we try. Later, at my hostel and on the airplane home, I would think about what I should have said. Listen, I did try Eastern medicine, but it failed me as well. I purified my water with a contraption that whizzed and whirled for four hours a day. I did lymphatic drainage massages. I took 40 supplements a day, spacing them hours away from the medications I was on. I did acupuncture. I put a red light therapy mask on my lower abdomen morning and night. I had a grounding blanket that I plugged into the wall. I fucking drank decaf coffee that had been tested for microplastics and mold. And I had a lot of unprotected sex in between these interventions, just in case.

The shaman just shrugged, as if thinking, poor lady with her wasted efforts that were completely unproductive in the eyes of our great mother ayahuasca. Forgive her for the things she does not know. 

Our cave was part of a cliff on an incline in the mountains, hardly a cave at all but more of a hole in the cliff’s face. I didn’t know when we would start drinking the ayahuasca; I didn’t ask and let them run the show, knowing that control had no place in my ceremony. I wondered if we’d talk during the actual trip itself and if I’d need to express how paranoid I was and how intense the visualizations were. I studied the silhouettes of the landscape in front of us. I imagined how the trees, three here, then a gap, then three more lower down, would all switch spots in the morning, because ayahuasca was going to shift space and time altogether. That would be one of the many little tricks it would play on me, I imagined. My mind went to great lengths to prepare myself for the unknown, right up to the very last minute.

It was finally time to drink. I liked the taste, thick and pungent. It tasted red. I briefly wondered if there was alcohol in it, given its sweet thickness, which reminded me of beers I had drunk in Jordan, where I had worked, that had upwards of 13% alcohol content. Didn’t matter, I supposed; I already made my peace with the controversies of this medicine in the AA community.

And so it began, it was in my system, a full cup of the mystery juice. I met a young Canadian earlier that day, walking around Cusco, who had just completed an ayahuasca retreat, and he told me how it works. After you drink it, you wait an hour, then you vomit, then the trip begins. The shamans and the internet told me that a lot of people vomit, but some don’t, and my shamans certainly wouldn’t be puking, because they were experts. But it wasn’t a sign of weakness to vomit either; it seemed to be the start of the magic. So I waited, I watched the trees, I felt cold and my back hurt, but the enlightenment would soon erase these mind-body problems.

Sitting there quietly, as the minutes ticked by, I started to wonder when the trees would start moving. My mind wandered towards my mom, but I did not get sad. Maybe that meant something was working, or perhaps it was just adrenaline. I usually get sad when I think about my mom, especially when off my meds.

Periodically throughout the night, the shamans sang little songs. I closed my eyes and let the songs hang in the air. They made me feel nothing, not even annoyance. I know nothing, and that is the way it’s supposed to be. 

After an hour or so, I stumbled forward. The taller shaman rose too, and we silently walked towards a large rock ten feet in front of our cave entrance. I leaned over and the sticky warm vomit came right up. All I had to do was will it up and it came, which made me feel more confident that this was my process. Calm, looking around at the moonlit, starless sky and the trees, I puked again. Shaman number two helped me back to my position on top of my sleeping bag, and there we waited some more.

I fought fatigue. We drank around 11 pm, which I know from one of their phones lighting up while pouring the liquid into my wooden cup. I had been up since 7, and hadn’t had anything to eat all day except for a few pieces of fruit at breakfast. I thought and I waited, thinking and waiting, angry, tired, nauseous, and very cold. My back hurt. I stared harder at the trees, willing them to move, and then shut my eyes, no more wishful thoughts to guide me on how magical an experience everyone said this should be. I saw little specks of light dance behind my eyelids. It was trippy, I thought, but not trippy enough. 

About an hour after puking, they asked if I wanted to drink more, which is customary. I didn’t turn my head towards them to answer right away, I thought very briefly if I shouldn't answer them at all. But then I did, and my thoughts came out awkwardly: I…don’t think…it’s working. I don’t think I’m feeling anything. It’s not working, yet, I don’t think. They were calm and asked again if I wanted more. And of course I did, I was there for my wild ride. Was that too much to ask for? Or to admit? 

Drinking the second cup made me convulse with nausea, as the red liquid was now associated with the vomit that had come up during round one. The sweet stickiness was now stinking, rotting garbage. Keeping it down had now become a real trial of endurance. I sat back down, more defeated somehow, more exacerbated, wondering what time it was, and if I could just go to sleep, thinking the next ceremony I’d do two days later would be different. I’d trip for sure next time. This must happen all the time, I thought to myself then; one night of it not working was sure to be expected and that’s why it’s encouraged to do it at least twice on retreat.

But I still forced myself to stay awake, to be present, to hope. Memories buzzed in my head. I nostalgically remembered when I didn’t need the same level of daily personal maintenance. I lived out of a travel bag for years in my 20s and 30s, roaming the world. Back then, I didn’t need contact solution; now I need purple shampoo. Besides taking daily medications, I have to replace my hair ties regularly. 

I thought about my cats back home. I thought of them seeing me as some kind of animal, exhibiting traits that they know to be common to the human species. They have also gained awareness of my particular qualities, like my habit of sitting on the couch, how I force them to pay attention to me, how I am fond of the TV machine.

I also thought of my neighbors who share the long apartment wall that separates our units. I wished I could connect my phone to their Bluetooth and play a Sam Harris podcast. Then we’d all see eye to eye.

It occurred to me how, If I could go back in time, I’d start trying to have a baby right when I first moved to New York, if it were even possible then. I thought about how I searched for a boyfriend first, but knowing what I know now, how I’d just skip right to it. I’d go straight to the doctors I know well and they’d tell me to follow a process, but I’d urge them to jump to more intense interventions. Use my eggs, I’d tell them. Let’s never stop trying.

There was a time when I studied abroad in Paris in college and a bunch of us American girls were sitting in the lawn in front of the Eiffel Tower talking about sex. One of the girls said she had 11 orgasms in one day. I can picture myself, now, interrupting the conversation, saying, come on, guys, you know when we’re older, there’s no way that’s going to keep happening, guys won’t have the stamina. These are things young people do. And then I’d look around and notice everyone staring at me. I'd have given away that I'm a time traveler, some of them catching on that I traveled back from the future.

Hours went by like this, lying on my side, so cold I needed to curl up inside my sleeping bag under multiple coats. I was facing away from my shamans, just looking at rocks in the darkness. My mind kept returning to the image of frozen cells in a lab somewhere, my last option, my only path. The shamans probably thought I was asleep, and I didn’t care. They sang a final song, this time with a little flute or something, and in that moment, the experience felt like a failure because I still felt like myself. 

In the morning, I woke up with a bark. I barked myself awake, maybe it was some kind of scream, definitely a guttural noise. I was out cold on my back, and my hat was pulled down over my eyes, which allowed me to sleep until 8 or so with a bright burning sun in my face. The shorter shaman was still snoozing but the tall one was up and seemed to think we should get moving; our taxi would be waiting for us at the bottom of the mountain at 9 to take us back to the city. I felt high and energetic, and also hopeful. I could have just been happy that round one was over.

I took in the warmth of the sun with my rested body, letting my mind bounce around the objects I could now see more clearly than the black silhouettes of the night. I watched the men pack our belongings and then burn sage, or palo santo—something I had in my bathroom back home. It took them a long time to set the little pyre alight, and I lent them my lighter to help it catch, excited about how I would write about this moment later on. How I would say how it was Chekov’s lighter, since I was unsure of packing it in my bag the night before, but surely if I mentioned that I’d be packing a lighter, it would have to come back into play. And here it would be, fulfilling its purpose.

On our walk down the mountain, I kept thinking about how mild and un-revelatory my experience was, but at least I didn’t shit my pants or cry. Maybe those were my true expectations, the fears of physical reactions, and not a godlike intervention to my little problems. Surely I would not be cured of sugar consumption. I didn’t think about having a baby much that morning. I wasn’t supposed to know, I tried to tell myself, holding on to the hopes of the second attempt; it was supposed to come to me. It just hadn’t yet.

Halfway down the mountain, the tall shaman pointed towards another slope in the distance. He told me we could see the Sacsayhuaman ruins.

I looked around, but didn’t really see anything. Just rocks. Five seconds later, I swung my head back towards him and shouted, sexy woman!

He smiled and put his thumbs up approvingly.

⁂

Two nights and another cave later, I was back at it. Sitting on the same sleeping bag, same middle-of-the-tarp set-up. I felt sober, and my last chance at resolution was crumbling before my eyes. I was more frustrated. I had greater expectations. It was harder to hold down the ayahuasca with the knowledge that I’d be vomiting afterward. But at the moment I was concluding that I was the sceptic who would never get her miracle, I got up to purge, stumbling towards the area to which I had been alerted during our preparation, and I saw something I did not expect. 

A huge green shimmering snake, perhaps five times the biggest anaconda on earth faced me head-on, its massive body curved around the rocks and rested right beside my legs. I wasn’t scared. I knew I was hallucinating, but I was still wary of looking it in the eyes. It was so beautiful. Green glistening flowers were pulsating off to the side, which were easier to focus on. Eventually, I bent down and stroked the snake’s green scales, noting the diamond patchwork on its skin, and it felt like snake. Everything was shining and wonderful. I was curious about what I would see in the same spot the next day, but I didn’t question anything else.

And that was it. I sat back down and essentially went through the same motions as I had the first night. I suffered from body aches and cold, I still sulked. I turned down the second cup and went to sleep early. I thought about going home.

I’ve tripped many times in my life on various hallucinogens. I’m not a heavyweight by any means; tripping comes fairly easily to me. Though I admit it does depend on my surroundings and company as to how profound the experience can be. When I see visuals, it’s rarely a fully formed object resting in space. It’s more a blurring of my surroundings, things that morph and take on new shapes, but eventually bounce back to their own. The snake was special. It didn’t come in and out of focus or change shape, it just sat there. The shamans didn’t need to tell me that the snake represents ayahuasca in Amazonian mythology. 

I think the easiest explanation for why I didn’t have a deeper or more transcendent ayahuasca trip is that the batch I drank from was weak. But my hippie acquaintance assured me she had a profound experience with the same shamans, and they also said it was strong stuff, that they were seeing some intense visuals during our nights in the mountains. And they have a decade or so of training under their belts. 

When pressed, the shamans told me it was because of my weak and unprepared system; I had done drugs and abused alcohol since my teens, my body and mind were not well prepared. I don’t accept their explanation. I hadn’t done drugs in a year, hadn’t drunk in over 3 years. And I’ve heard about heroin addicts successfully taking ayahuasca to cure their addictions.

I’m not a conventionally spiritual person, and new age beliefs are even less appealing to me than traditional religion. But I do take meaning from this experience and the months leading up to it. What happened or didn’t happen in Cusco is my answer. There are no quick fixes. I have to do the hard work and self-investigation to make this huge life decision. That’s it. No one can make this decision to have a baby for me but me, not even a giant snake (although the shamans did tell me it represents ancient wisdom). I’m ok with seeing only decisions in front of me that I must make, rather than answers. 

I’m also ok with the skeptical voice in my head being there to protect me, and the adventurer in me still hoping for miracles. I’ll add ayahuasca to my never-ending list of experiences, good and bad.

It’s hard to say out loud that I’ve decided to go through with embryo adoption, but that’s where I’m at. I want to do it. I’m nowhere near finalizing anything yet, but I’m making progress. And very crucially to this next stage, or perhaps for the rest of my life, I need to reframe what it means to be a mother. I’ve never doubted that I will love the baby and that we will be a family, which is what has kept me on the path to motherhood for so long, but I was never owed anything, not by the universe or ayahuasca or by my mom. I still feel grief and fear, I have not surrendered to my journey, but I don’t think this is supposed to be an exercise in pure happiness and resolution either, especially when it’s an atypical path. It just happens to be my path, one I will always be on, always wandering, with or without my child.