He waits for us by a pillar in the center of an ancient walled Tuscan village. He is Angelo, our guide for the day through Etruscan ruins. My first glance tells me he is steadfast and amicable, with unassuming olive skin under the threadbare yellow t-shirt he had probably already worn twice that week. But now is not the time to consider more. I’m accompanied by my three children, ranging in age between 11 and 16; and also my mother. 

We’re not the kind of extended family that travels together. In fact, this trip to Italy marks the first time my mom and kids have gone anywhere together, besides a stop at the grocery store or once when we walked along the Ashokan Reservoir near my home in Upstate New York. This trip is one giant step in a slow dance of starting to let my mother back into our lives. Prior to the trip, I had consulted with numerous friends on where to go in Italy and why. Angelica, a native to Tuscany, is devoted to goddesses and matriarchal models of society. She introduced me to lore around ancient Etruscan civilization and suggested this would be the perfect setting to strengthen my maternal lineage. “Etruscans were older than the Romans,” she told me, “and they were much less violent. They were a matriarchal people with women at the core of family and society.” 

I was convinced. As soon as she told me this, I booked a villa with a pool and found some good restaurants, but the main event was decidedly going to be walking in the footsteps of the Etruscans. I needed some ancient wisdom to guide me in repairing the lost bonds between women in my family, if my daughters and I were going to be ok. 

Just minutes into our tour, before we even leave the walled village, I tell our guide as much: “I really want to do this tour to learn about the matriarchal society of the Etruscans.” 

Angelo stops in his tracks. “No, no.” Now we are both stopped and he is looking right at me. “The Etruscans were not matriarchal.” 

I persist, ungracefully: “But my friend, she’s studied mythologies... she said... and most of history has obscured women’s power because it’s told by patriarchal authors.” I might have told him that he had been reading the wrong history books. 

Of course, there have been and still are matriarchal societies. Matriarchal has never meant that women have dominance over men. Rather, matriarchal societies can be matrilineal – people build themselves around maternal lineages – or matrilocal – people steward land and build family life around maternal origins. I had previously read Heidi Gottner-Abendroth’s Matriarchal Societies, which articulates the meaning of matriarchy far beyond the emotional comprehension I had at the time. I simply wanted to forego the need for men, trying to erase them as they had tried to erase me. 

“Women were important in Etruscan society,” Angelo assures me. “I studied anthropology before moving here. There is evidence of women in business, much more than in most societies, and women’s names were frequently included on their burial sites. But they were not matriarchal.” Still looking at me, he finishes with a thesis that will ripple into all of our encounters. “They built their society on equality.” 

I wonder if he could see it from the moment we were approaching: the missing link that I had unwittingly come to Tuscany to find. As far as men go in my family, there is no father, no husband; there is only my son. 

Now, we are walking in the footsteps of the Etruscans. We walk through the magical vie cave, cave roads carved down into the Earth over centuries, and out into olive groves overlooking the fortressed city. My children’s interest begins to wane; they exchange a few too many sausage jokes when Angelo gives us snacks made from local boar. My mother, too, alternates between exhaustion and sharing inappropriate stories. Chorizo penises remind her of the time she spent as an ER nurse: “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen men put up there.” Even though we are different than his usual tour groups, Angelo welcomes the banter of my peculiar family. When we part, he gives me a hug. We all linger in his company, and he gives me his phone number and recommendations for attractions nearby. “The hot springs at Saturnia are known for their healing minerals,” he says. If we decide to go, he might be able to join us. My kids have already meandered down the cobblestone road and out of sight. Before I wander off to find them, Angelo and I hug again, an embrace both unexpected and welcome. 

Several days later we have a plan. In summer, the thermal baths are too hot to visit during the day, so we will meet there after dark. We, this time, is limited to Angelo and I. “I’m going to the spa after dinner,” I tell my family. Accustomed as they are to secrets – my mother pretends not to know what happened between my father and I; my children aren’t in a place to know the details of their father and I’s relationship – no one asks any questions. 

— 

Angelo drops a pin and tells me to meet him there at 10pm. It is a dirt road, secluded. Not the tourist entrance. 

I pull up behind his car and even before I get out I can feel his relief, my excitement. “I wasn’t sure if you were really coming,” he tells me, “but I’m so glad you did.” We walk past tall grasses with headlamps on to light the way. At a small opening in the grass, he puts down his bag, turns off his light, and brings out a bottle of wine. “How do you feel about skinny dipping?” he asks me. I take off a long, sleeveless red dress, followed by a much too restrictive red one piece bathing suit. Naked, but still covered in desire. 

He takes my hand and guides us down wet stones into the hot, mineral rich, moonlit stream. With every step we are less separate. Our first kiss, consuming. Angelo steadies himself on a low rock, submerged underwater up to his torso. His lap becomes my throne. 

The force of once volcanic waters moves us downriver, and every private corner gives more opportunities for our bodies to come together. A bridge with a chain-link fence stops us from entering the bath’s more popular areas. This is our terminus, our arrival, our dissolution. Metal diamonds become a friend, a grip for fingers to hold steady my floating body. His legs face mine and with hands on my thighs he floats, too, in and out of my body, a dance both tender and potent. I feel now what it is like to speak whole languages without words. 

Hours later we emerge from a bath that I can only think of as alchemical. He sowed a change in me that is fully felt, as old as time, and yet germinal. Our bodies don’t remember how to separate, kissing defiantly at the departure point of our two cars, only to meet again at the next intersection where his car stops, then mine. “Any time you are back here,” Angelo tells me, “come find me.” 

He texts the next day with a picture of the bottle of wine, itself delicious but mostly untouched, from the night before. “We didn’t finish this.” I know. Oh God, do I know. 

My family and I will be traveling to Rome for a few days before they return home. I will need to escort them, but then I have plans to stay in Italy for an organized bike trip. The kids will be with their dad, my dog at the boarder, and I have another week scheduled off work. “Angelo,” I text back, “I have a crazy idea.”

“Tell me,” he says. 

“What if I came back... in a few days? Would that be too soon for you?” My holiday is his busy season, but some things can’t wait. He answers me: “Come.” 

— 

First, though, I have to leave. My family and I slowly leave the villa’s lavender-filled garden and its private pool looking out into the Maremma countryside. We stop along the coast to bathe in the sea. My youngest jumps into gentle waves, keeping a smile on her sun-kissed face the entire afternoon. When we make it to Rome, night has fallen. Temperatures during the day are over 115’; without the sun it is still 100’. Echoes of Romans overtaking Etruscans and their way of life, this separation feels brutal. 

My mom had booked a guided day trip to visit some of Rome’s most famous burial sites, starting with the Capuchin Crypt and ending with the Catacombs. My middle daughter’s fear of death meets its match in the crypts. She is mesmerized by the skulls piled symmetrically onto each other, crossbones viscerally depicting beauty, devotion, and the unsympathetic passage of time all at once. It is quite something to see that much death stacked up before you. Not plastic replicas at Halloween. Other people, thousands of them, now without flesh or soul, mixed up decoratively with the bones of others. My mother is fascinated, and my daughter’s anxiety is calmed in this place. 

At dusk we walk the cobblestone streets of Trastevere, making our way to an outdoor pizzeria with red checkered tablecloths. Food in sight, my youngest becomes her talkative self again. She chides me, as she likes to do, for my dating choices. None of my boyfriends are good enough for her – perhaps because she wants me all to herself, or maybe she’s caught my deep aversion to men. Whatever the reason, she frequently reminds me of her perspective. “Ugh, mom, how could you have ever dated Jeff? He doesn’t even know what he’s doing with his life!” 

My mom has no idea who Jeff is but that doesn’t matter. She sees the way we are critical of men and immediately brings up my father. “Why do you do that Tracy?” Her tone is serious, incurious, bitter. “Why are you always so hard on your dad? Why don’t you give him a chance?” 

At 42 years old, I have given my father many chances. He would never come around, but it would always be my fault for no longer waiting. The only reason we are here – my mother, my children, and I – is because I hoped it would be possible to have a relationship with her that isn’t overdetermined by her loyalty to my father. “Mom,” I say, “if you want to stay on this trip then we are not going to talk about my father.” She changes the subject, and we spend a few more days together. 

— 

I characteristically avoid experiences: relationships, sex, meeting my mentors. Some part of me doesn’t really believe my desire will find a place to land, so even if I initiate something meaningful, I hold myself back from realizing it. With Angelo, though, I go in headlong. Sure, when it’s just me and my suitcase back on those cobblestone streets looking for his door, my heart races like crazy. But that’s not the same thing as hesitation. I have traveled across the world to find the desiring parts of my body, and now they are insistent that I attend to them. 

Yes, the desires of my sexual body are met, and unforgettably so; but only because they are commensurate with the meeting of something more elemental. 

Angelo knows all the best places, but they’re not clubs or galleries. On one of our first days together, he takes me to the Necropolis of the Mermaids. As we hike into the necropolis, he points out large areas of flat tufa rock that peak out through lush greenery on the ridge. “Those are tombs, and they used to be painted bright colors that people could see from far away. In Etruscan times, people lived with their dead all around them.” Angelo moved here after his parents died, and I have a sense that he needs to be in places where he can feel the vibrancy of many ancestors. As someone who named all her children after saints, I can appreciate that. We continue on into a remarkable neighborhood of the dead from the 3rd century BCE. With bodies long gone, it is possible to enter some of the tombs, cool containers built into the rock. For a moment I feel what it is like to be there, long dead yet a visible reminder to people from all over the world of how things once were. 

Another day, as we lie on the banks of a quiet crater lake, Angelo tells me stories of the Etruscan goddess Uni. She was worshipped as a symbol of fertility and motherhood alongside her consort Tinia, and together they formed the supreme couple. He points to a mountain in the distance. “There,” he said, “Tinia is said to live on top of that mountain, which used to be a volcano and where all the waters at Saturnia pass through. He is god of the sky, thunder, and wind.” Immediately, I want to go there, and I want to go with him. Angelo isn’t a god, but he certainly knows how to get close to them. 

I had pre-paid for the all-inclusive bike trip and don’t have money left for anything else. Without my asking, Angelo buys and cooks our meals (mostly shirtless, grazie mille), drives us around the villages he knows by heart, and treats me to dinners where the local restaurateurs are his acquaintances and friends. His generosity makes me unsure of what I can contribute. But more than that, I need him to prove that a man still has something good to give. 

At the mountain’s trailhead, Angelo realizes that he has come poorly prepared. “It often storms here and you can’t predict it. Tinia, you know.” He is kicking himself. Even though he’s a certified guide, we don’t have extra layers or waterproofing. “It’s ok,” I say. “I have a good feeling about this one.” We trek on, not seeing another hiker the whole way up. Only the sun’s rays streak through a forest of beech trees, coupled with the ever-present voice of the wind. A few cracks of lightening become visible from a clearing to the East. When we make it to the top of Mount Amiata, I have no doubt that he has given me something. 

I wasn’t always aloof to men. As a young teenager, I fell in love with the Christian God who was loving, all knowing, and definitely male. He was my safety. I prayed every day, multiple times a day, and tried to get everyone I knew to come to church with me. I met an atheist who became my first husband, but not before I convinced him to come to church. It didn’t take long for a series of events to eat away at my safety though: our gay priest was disappeared by the diocese, abortion and the agency of women were deemed murderous, massive sex abuse within the church was revealed, and I divorced a man who thought the church was fine but that my need for a separation was sacrilegious. So, for a decade before I met Angelo, the only gods I worshipped were female. Which makes it all the more remarkable that at Mount Amiata, I can hear the spirit on the wind and call him Tinia. I never want to stop hearing it, and I never want to stop being around the men who can take me to it. 

Even though there are many tourists at the summit (there’s a lift!?), I am not ready to go back down. “Let’s sit and have a drink.” I want to look at him longer there, to linger on that supernatural peak where the spirit moves in abundance. And I pay for our drinks, because it is time for me to give back. 

—

I cross the Atlantic to be matrilocal with my children again. But rather than mourn my time with Angelo as over, a spark remains. It becomes possible to name a longstanding split within me: Where does a mother locate herself to love her children, and love a man in the process? 

— 

Placing these questions on the backburner, I begin a course of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. MDMA isn’t just a party drug, but a potent medicine with breakthrough therapeutic potential. It minimizes fear while enhancing a sense of connection and love, making it highly effective in working through traumatic experiences. Specifically, because it lessens a person’s usual fear response while simultaneously deepening the presence of self-love, MDMA can unlock memories that highly traumatized people are often too scared to go near. 

I didn’t always think of myself as “highly traumatized.” What I did know is that I had almost no memory of my childhood up until my late teens. The way I have talked about my father is such that people often think he is dead or divorced from my mom, even though they are still married. I became estranged from my father when I had children, for reasons both vague and clear (“He doesn’t respect me,” I told my mom. That never satisfied her, but “It’s not safe” convincingly ran through my body). Before MDMA, I knew the memories of my childhood weren’t just gone, but that they were more likely dissociated from my day-to-day thoughts. Even with that knowledge, I fundamentally couldn’t trust men, and I was always on the move from one home to another. The good thing about that lifestyle was that no one could pin me down; an unintended consequence was that I couldn’t even pin myself down. I came to MDMA asking for help remembering my childhood. With that, I wanted to confront the father I wished I never had. 

It seems now that my questions about love never really went on the backburner. Some people will tell you that you can only get to love if you face your hate first, but I think it’s the other way around. I needed experiences of care and devotion to anchor me, to give me the strength to look at what happened, and to name it. Knowing that I love some men, I can face the fact that I hate others. 

A friend of mine had used MDMA when she needed to leave her marriage and everything it was covering up. Cindy spoke of her medicine guide with the deep respect of a person whose life has been held and transformed in another’s presence. The only hitch? They were both based in Northern California. It wasn’t the most straightforward path to enlightenment, but it was the one that called me. I decided to book a ticket from New York for a long weekend outside of San Francisco. 

My first meeting with Sophie is over the phone. She understands my need to work through trauma, but she also isn’t bogged down by trauma as the only reality. Even though I spoke with a few other MDMA facilitators, I feel myself open the most with Sophie. It’s obvious to me that few people can enter dark places with as much stability as she does. We meet a few times online so that she can get to know my background, prep me for the medicine day, and above all so that I feel comfortable. 

“Why am I doing this?” I write on the first page of a new journal as I fly across the country. “I want to know myself, which has to include whatever happened to me. I want to know if I was sexually abused. I want to know why I hate my father.” With this longing comes an admission: “I’m afraid. I’ve been afraid my whole life. But I’m also ready to not be so afraid.” 

Sophie and I had planned to meet at her retreat space – an apartment used just for this purpose – one Saturday morning. She greets me at the door with a hug. After I take off my shoes, we walk down the hall to the medicine room. This room mostly contains a queen-sized mattress placed directly on the floor. There are also objects collected on an altar for safe journeying, along with the predictable, kitschy psychedelic images of toads and Jerry Garcia. Before I take my position on the bed, we check in about my intentions, and Sophie blesses my whole body with palo santo. She has brought me warm socks because I forgot mine. Besides that, I wear my comfiest clothes: a tank-top with no bra, yoga pants, and a merch sweatshirt from my favorite temple printed with this quote: “The truth, of course, is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.” I take the powder capsule, put on an eye mask, and sink down into the bed. 

Within thirty minutes, I feel a tingling like warm liquid moving outward from my shoulders. The medicine always enters my body like this, in rippling, intensifying waves. Two images flash. The first: a cross section of an old growth redwood tree, as if to say I am but one ring in a long, long lineage. There are so many things this bloodline has been through. And the second image: the Egyptian Eye. I did not previously know then that this is the Eye of Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris. The eye is a totem of protection when seeking to repair what has been torn apart. The eye comes to me with a birdlike beak and transforms into a falcon. She perches high in the tops of the tallest trees until she flies, alternatingly, to the low ground below. I go wherever she goes. 

At times, I feel close to death. I hear the zip of a man’s pants, but cannot see more. “Turn off the music,” I instruct Sophie. “We have to be so quiet, so still, that he thinks I’m asleep and can’t remember anything.” My body recalls my throat being choked by two thumbs and the allover paralysis that came with it. In this state it seems as if my breath might stop altogether. Fear enters, as protection. I shoot up from under the covers, the falcon carrying me back to the tops of the trees. I am released from the suffocating reality of my own body being subjected violently to another’s. Up here, I am back in my comfortable position, watching the lives of others from a great distance. So it is: dissociation isn’t a curse. It is both perspective giving and life saving. 

Several times I am carried in the falcon’s wings from the treetops back down into my own body. I feel the fear that accompanied threats on my life if I were to ever tell – or even know – of the sexual violations that happened to me. Always, when the fear becomes unbearable, I return to disembodied heights. As the medicine wears off, the falcon takes me back to the treetops and lets me look out from the nest. This time, instead of observing other people’s lives, I look down at my own. In my childhood bedroom, I can see the distant image of a man’s body thrusting. My silent, still body lies underneath. It am too far away to see who it was, but at least I can finally glimpse this reality of my childhood. 

— 

Several days later, a friend from the U.S. texts me with an opposite image: “I just saw Angelo!” “What?” I ask her, “Did you book a tour with him?” I knew she and her new husband were traveling through Italy for their honeymoon, so I had suggested they plan their visit with the best. “No, we didn’t get down to that part of Tuscany, we’re at the Uffizi. But I swear it was him. Thirty minutes ago. In line. Ask him!!!” Angelo and I hadn’t spoken in months, but the medicine had opened a portal where things were being revealed in all directions, so what did I have to lose? “Hey, my friend thinks she saw you just now. At the Uffizi. Isn’t that weird?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Whoa. It’s only weird because actually, I am here.” We share a few friendly exchanges, and Angelo acknowledges that it must have been pretty powerful medicine. But then we continue on in our separate lives: he in Italy, I in New York. 

— 

I return for my second medicine day a few months later. By now, Angelo is far from my mind. I’ve been celibate for six months, unintentionally at first but then I leaned into it. My dreams are filled with images of my parents, uncles, snakes and other dangers. I seem to be clearing a path back to my childhood that I had always tried so hard to avoid. 

The second meeting with Sophie is just like the first, except this time I brought my own socks. I lay on the now familiar bed, medicine tingling down my arms, through my body. Immediately, I feel myself being lowered into a sarcophagus. Egyptian probably. That’s one thing that is different about this journey: more assured that I will be ok, I resist the descent less. This is a burial, I understand, but I enter it willingly. This time I won’t be able to fly away from the experiences that had happened to my body, the exact experiences that I had flown here to get closer to. 

Although I’m not resisting, I am still afraid. I ask for something apotropaic to be buried with me. “The coffins of Egyptians are thoroughly decorated inside,” I plead with the medicine. “They don’t enter the underworld alone.” I long for animal totems, hieroglyphics carved into my sightline, anything that might accompany me... Before I can think too much about what isn’t there though, I feel my body reenacting a scene. I direct Sophie to use whatever she can to restrain me: free weights, a bedsheet, socks. My thighs are opened and bound so that I cannot close them; my arms and hands tied beside me so they cannot move. I need something to choke me. Sophie scrambles to find more weight. “Use any random thing you can to hold me down,” I snarl in a gruff whisper. “That’s what he would have done.” Sophie comes back with a five-pound bag of flour and deftly ties it around my throat with an exercise band, tight enough that I can’t scream and that I can only barely breathe. I lay like this for hours: manipulated and paralyzed. My body had followed a hardwired script, and I can finally admit that my father was its author. 

Even in those years when I was estranged from him, I had not hated my father, and I hadn’t wished him dead; I just pretended he wasn’t there. But the medicine allowed me to feel the weight of him on my life – not only the way his emotions always trumped mine in getting the care of my mother, or the way his narcolepsy made him fall asleep anytime something meaningful was happening, but his actual cruelty to my body – and now I did want him dead. In an instant we swap places, and he is in the ground. He is buried so far away that my soul will never again have to encounter him in the future of time, but not before I can use my bare hands to throw dirt over his dead body like my mother taught me with so many bodies before. The only thing my father taught me was how to cut a cantaloupe. And it’s the only thing I know he loved purely, so I throw cantaloupe seeds on the soil too. “Maybe they will nourish you, and in your next life you can try to do something that isn’t a waste.” 

Ecstasy is a strange medicine. It delivers not according to what you think you need, but what you actually need. With my father gone, I return to my own burial. Things are different. I am in a rectangular tomb, the walls and ceilings covered in unmistakable red frescoes. Etruscan, not Egyptian. Within this tomb I am laid inside a sarcophagus. I am not alone though; Angelo is buried with me. 

I hadn’t been given an apotropaic object, not when I cried out for it. What I was given was a partner into the afterlife, as close as any two people could ever be. I would later learn that there is, in fact, a Sarcophagus of the Couples, not too far away from the Necropolis of the Mermaids. Many urns are found throughout Etruscan Italy to have the joint remains of both a man and a woman. Equal. 

It is sometimes hard to find a justification for living when I think of my existence as inseparable from the vileness of my bloodline. But every death is also a birth, and hot springs flow with timeless remaking. My life didn’t begin with my father. If I look back several generations and still don’t find an upstanding man, that’s not where the story of my life began either. Further back, I come from a time where women were respected, loved, and held, as equals. The erotics of oneness have been in my bones for millennia. That is my true origin story.