pc28¹ÙÍø

It took a great deal of restraint not to jump up, grab a feather duster and sweep them away.

I took a deep breath. It was a rare thing for me to lie down during the day, and the fact there was a guest in my home and I was facing away from the television was unsettling. I kept looking at the cobwebs. I took another breath.

I worried Julia, my drug supplier and guide,Ìýwould be bored. The social researcher in me switched on. I wanted to know about her life. How had she arrived at this kind of work? What is her clientele like? More women than men? Young, old, rich, not so rich? What kinds of agonies has she seen unfurl before her on couches across the country and around the world?

I took another breath.

She was definitely bored.

The first track ended and a similar one started up, more rhythmic drumming but with voices this time.

I closed my eyes. Maybe the drug won’t work on me. Maybe I’ll just have a forced nap. That would be nice enough. I felt tired.

I broke the silence but didn’t open my eyes.Ìý

“I’m not sure I have anything to say at the moment. I’m worried you might be bored.”

Julia reminded me she wasn’t necessarily there to ask me questions like my therapist. She was there to guide and respond to whatever emerged. Apparently, some people are silent throughout the whole session, lying still as tears stream from their eyes. Others start talking and don’t stop.

I can’t recall whether it was during the third song or the fourth when it happened. Julia’s notes say I took the drug at 10:46 and by 11:01 I said I was “feeling it.”

It started like the familiar feeling from a joint or a strong painkiller, that comforting tug towards the ground, away from pain and tension. And then it quickly became something else.

Have you ever laid down on the beach where the waves crawl across the sand, and let them slowly drag you into the ocean until you are no longer on the shore but floating on the surface?

It was like that, only instead of floating on cold water, I was held by a warm body of emotion and memory. And then I submerged, and was slowly dragged by a riptide that should have frightened me but didn’t. A riptide that moved me from memory to memory to memory in unexpected ways.

At first, this riptide dragged me into a memory I’ve recalled a few times a week since my daughter Stella was born. But the MDMA made me rememberÌý— made me feelÌý— this memory differently from the way I usually do.

Stella is a twin, the first one out of the womb and the only child the hospital staff gave me to hold after I had my C-section. Her sister Sadie wasn’t breathing and so she went straight from my body into an incubator and then into an ambulance, sent to the only available NICU ward on the other side of town.

I was full to the brim with the drugs from the epidural when they put Stella on my chest to hold. It was a moment I usually describe as pure happiness. I’d thrashed my way through blood, pain, needles and piles of money to get to that moment. This was the first memory that the MDMA riptide pulled me towards, but the feeling I experienced through the drug was not pure happiness, but something else.

The absence of terror.Ìý

I had, in fact, been terrified every second of that long, hard pregnancy. Terrified that the babies would die. That my tired, overwhelmed, unloved body would kill them. I had successfully suppressed those feelings, not just while I was pregnant with the twins but ever since.

The MDMA made me understand that, made me feel that moment differently.Ìý

I sat in the memory refashioned by the drug. Eyes closed, all awareness of my surroundings had melted away. I couldn’t feel the couch underneath me or the temperature of the air around me. I only barely registered the soundscape of Julia’s music, when one song shifted into the next.

What I could feel was the light weight of my daughter on the left side of my chest, above the heart. I sat in that memory for seconds, minutes, maybe more. It was impossible to judge at the time.

Then, gently, the riptide pulled me away, towards something that could not be described as a memory at all, unless you believe babies have memories that can be stored and recalled.

I walked into a sparse, dark room with one window and a crib in the centre. It was as if I had gotten up from the bed with Stella and walked into this second scene alone. The crib was wooden, empty except for a mattress and a baby. The baby was me. I was neither happy nor sad. Just still, silent. My mother was standing in the corner of the room, looking like I’ve seen her in family photos as a young woman, slender with long dark brown hair parted in the middle, wearing a 1970s-style dress. She was staring at the baby, not with love nor malice but impassivity. Still, silent, like the baby. I walked over to the crib, picked myself up and left the room. I lay down again on the hospital bed, restored Stella to her original place on my left side and put the baby, me as I was in 1972, on the right side.

The drug wasn’t yet strong enough to stop me from an inner snort at the cliché. Embracing my inner child. I would never have let myself conjure up something this banal.

Looking back at this moment, it’s the impassive face of my mother that I return to. How familiar the expression was. The same ‘dead’ face I would see over my father’s shoulder as he raged at me, when he would grab me by the shoulders and shake me or hit me or throw me. The same face when I came to her for help at any crisis point in my life.

You need help. Part of me wants to help you. But I’m not going to help you.

Lying on the hospital bed with the two babies, I wondered, What next? Where should I go now? Some part of my brain was still trying to control what was happening, trying to get through a psychological ‘to-do list,’ the way I plow through tasks at the shopping centre. But as Julia had told me, the process has a wisdom of its own.

I was still trying to second-guess where the drug might pull me when I found myself floating over a blistering hot desert scene, red earth and a cloudless blue sky, quintessentially outback Australia, a place I’d never visited and had only seen in pictures. A voice I didn’t recognize, a man’s voice, reassuring and low, told me to “let go.” And I did, surrendering. I sank deeper.

In that deeper state I could both visualize and feel something open up inside me. A slowly churning, greyish whirlpool. It was as if it was made of millions of flecks of sand. I peered into it; it was bottomless. I know it sounds contradictory that I could look into it while it was inside me, but it was possible. I knew, I felt, that the whirlpool was an endless pit of sadness lying just beneath the anger I had been feeling so acutely.

The whirlpool was not sadness for myself, what I’d gone through, but for my mother. My father too. I believe they were never really taught how to love. How lamentable that was. For them. For us as a family.

I stared into the whirlpool for what felt like ages. Suddenly I was aware that my neck felt wet. Perhaps I was cold, but also sweating, like you do when you have a temperature. I touched my face with one hand and realized it was wet with tears. It wasn’t the kind of crying I was used to, hot tears of frustration and angry sobs, but a steady stream of noiseless tears.

I returned my wet hand to my side and found myself in the midst of another memory. Not so much a suppressed memory, but a memory I had forgotten to remember. I was six years old. We had returned to Oxford, England, for one of the many sabbaticals my father would take us on, to the town of my birth and the place where he was determined one day to hold the prestigious chair in international law. I was sick with a very bad flu. I was lying in a single bed in the room I shared with my sister, hovering in that half-conscious, half-delirious state of high fever,Ìýmy mother sitting by the bed, close to me, holding a damp, cool flannel to my forehead. In the dim glow of the bedside lamp, I could see her face in the half-light. My eyes were closed, but I would open them every now and then to look at her. To check she was still there, close to me.

I remember the look on her face. One of concentrated, undistracted concern. While I felt awful because of the fever, I felt something else, something that only under the MDMA thrall could I properly identify.

I felt safe.

I didn’t want the fever to end.

I sat in the memory of my mother’s soft attention and the cool cloth on my head.

“This is what love feels like,” I said to Julia.

Did I want more of the medicine, Julia asked.

“Yes please. Could I have a blanket too?”

The water felt cold and strange as I swallowed capsule number two.

Adapted excerpt from “Sassafras: A Memoir of Love, Loss and MDMA therapy”ÌýBy Rebecca Huntley ©2024. Reproduced with the permission of Hachette Australia, 2024.