My Mom loved Sinead O’Connor. I say “loved” instead of “loves” because I’m not sure if she still remembers. I’ll find out when I see her.
Mom was adopted, and found out who her birth mother was in her late forties after a lot of digging. Though Mom had grown up in an Irish Catholic family, learning that her birth mother had been born in Ireland kicked off an obsession that guided most of her life after that. She took Harvard Extension courses in Irish history and literature. One course was devoted entirely to reading Joyce’s Ulysses. Eventually, Mom went through the master’s program in Irish Studies at Boston College. After rejecting Catholicism as a college freshman, she was now under the tutelage of Jesuits, which took some adjustment. She had the fierce and brilliant Mary Daly to guide her through, as a mentor and living example of female resistance.
This was the early Nineties, when Ireland was beginning to reckon with the abuse the Catholic Church had heaped on women and children in their country, a decade before the Boston Globe did its Spotlight series on abusive priests here. Like in the US, Irish priests who had sexually assaulted children had been quietly moved to other parishes, their crimes covered up.
Unlike in the US, the Catholic Church dominated Ireland. They ran the social programs, including schools, orphanages, and the infamous Magdalene Laundries.
Sinead O’Connor spoke openly about the abuse she’d suffered as an neglected child at the mercy of the church. My mother loved her for that, and for her gorgeous, piercing, soaring, angry voice. She played her albums over and over at home, marveling in her poetic ferocity.
I know I was watching live when Sinead ripped up the picture of John Paul II. I knew her background, I knew what was going on in Ireland, so I was proud and amazed. I don’t know why I was surprised when she suffered more abuse because of her act. All those men saying they wanted to slap her. Booed at a tribute to Bob Freakin’ Dylan, the ultimate Boomer icon of speaking angry truth to power.
Sinead herself came to see the angry reaction as a gift. She was freed from having to be a nice, pleasing pop princess. She could make her music on her own terms again. She could be publicly angry and sad and complicated without apology.
She’s too much for me. I’m overwhelmed by her voice. I can only take it in measured doses. It’s too beautiful and raw.
For Mom, it was the perfect expression of the rage she herself felt and tried to control. The anger that I got to see so often. Sinead sang the stories Mom knew needed to be told, even if people didn’t want to hear them.