I always wanted to meet Princess Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom, and now I can.

Inflation keeps stealing a month's pay every time you turn around.  Crime is rampant.  Teachers' unions keep finding new ways to keep schools closed.  Your husband might lose his job to the next woke fad, which you support, of course, because there's no room for dissent, and all your fellow suburban moms rededicate themselves to be down with the cause every other week.  If you're a mom herding the kids through all this and life prior to 2019 left you unprepared to deal with any level of stress, what do you do? 

Leave it to National Public Radio to put its finger on the pulse of what suburban moms are doing to cope with the stress of life under COVID, crime, war, and Joe Biden.

They're turning to microdosing illegal psychedelic mushrooms!  By the thousands, reports NPR.

"I don't think that I would be nearly as present as I am right now had it not been for psychedelics and for the healing that I've gotten from it," one Denver mom named Ariel told NPR. 

Comedian Tracy Tee says she's microdosing shrooms to deal with COVID lockdowns killing her career (but she won't blame Democrats who imposed the lockdowns, or China that still won't come clean about the origins of the virus, or unions shutting down her kid's school.  "And we've moved past, I think, wanting to guzzle five bottles of wine.  We're craving something deeper, and we're definitely craving community," Tee told NPR.

Community in mushrooms?  Sounds like a Smurfs cartoon.

The moms aren't following the science.  Research into mind-altering mushrooms isn't deep and hasn't been going on very long.  No one knows what the long-term effects of any of this fungal experimentation will be.  But if you're one of the thousands of stressed-out moms battling modern life, tomorrow is a whole lot less important than right now.  And right now, Mommy needs relief that won't spend a second on the lips and a lifetime on the hips.  The old-school reach for a bottle of Chardonnay makes all those hours spent doing yoga poses while the kids are Zooming social studies pointless.  Microdosing mushrooms may mess with your brain, but it doesn't add any calories.

NPR's Allison Sherry solemnly intones that these moms need a little help coping with it all.

There is something deeper here. Researchers are looking at lack of structural support for women or maybe too much pressure on parents in today's times. Major depressive disorder is currently the leading cause of disease burden for women internationally. The moms making these decisions, though, say they aren't necessarily trying to escape but that psychedelics allow them to be better in the present.

Well.  There certainly is something deeper here.  We've replaced the family and church with social media and wokeness.  The radical woking dead zombie left has turned our schools into indoctrination centers and the workplace into an ideological battlefield.  Even Coke and the NFL went woke.  The days of community rallying to support anyone, instead of competing with everyone and tearing each other apart as we feel like we're all forced to do now, may explain some of the amped-up stress the mushroom moms of the metroplexes face. 

A.J. Rice is president & CEO of Publius PR, editor-in-chief of The Publius National Post, and author of the #1 Amazon bestseller The Woking Dead: How Society's Vogue Virus Destroys Our Culture.

Image via Max Pixel.