Thinking about Sinead O'Connor

Thinking about Sinead O’Connor

I can’t seem to get over how much her early life and mine ran parallel. We are 10 years apart, to the day.

When you grow up with a mother who obviously can’t stand you, goal number one becomes pleasing them, and it never ends. If love doesn’t come from a mother, it just doesn’t happen, ever. Love is an unknown, but it’s absence makes you know that something is wrong and it’s your fault. Of course, throw in a hefty dose of “God hates you and you’re gonna burn in a lake of fire forever,” because every isolated, bullied and different looking child needs to hear that!

Sinead rebelled. I went in the opposite direction. I never developed into an actual person. I became a chameleon, sizing up everyone I met, then trying to be who they wanted me to be. I thought it was like that for everyone, until a fellow student in high school told me differently. At that point, I knew I needed to do a much better job of appearing normal.

The thing is, I couldn’t be normal, and I couldn’t appear normal, either. I had no friends, and though my parents and brother existed, their main requirement for me to go on living was to become invisible - non-existent. To quote Jackson Browne, because he says it better than I can, “there was a world of illusion and fantasy, in the place where the real world belongs. Still, I look for the beauty of songs.”

The woman who played the organ at our southern Baptist church agreed to give me piano lessons when I was 6. Owning a piano was a requirement, though. I went to a used piano store with my parents, and they bought the second to the cheapest one. I begged them to buy the cheapest one, but I think it was too ugly for my mother to consider having it in her house.

I remember when it arrived. It was beautiful in it’s functional, sturdy simplicity. It was an old black upright build in the 1800’s in Boston. No scroll work or elaborate carvings - just straight simple lines, shining black. My mom told me that I was not to lay a hand on it until I learned to read and play music. On the keys, anyway. I polished it with Scott’s Liquid Gold at least twice a week for a decade.

After everyone went to bed, I sat on the floor by that piano and sobbed until my whole body shook. I couldn’t breathe. I hoped that my bronchial asthma was finally gonna take me out of this world, but it didn’t. I had to continue on, with my orange afro and glasses like the bottom of coke bottles, hacking and coughing and chugging codeine cough syrup. Wearing an eye patch on my only functional eye in a useless attempt to force my “lazy” blind eye to see. It never did.

At some point, that piano became my escape from this world. Apparently, I excelled at it. That was my piano teacher’s opinion. She was the only person who held an opinion on that subject, or anything else pertaining to my existence. She let me sit with her in church sometimes, and would give me a piece of hard candy to suck on when the coughing started. As for my mom, she would pinch me on the arm tightly and hold a small section of skin between her fingernails, and in a shouted whisper, tell me to “Stop it! Just stop it!” Since I couldn’t actually do that, I got up and wandered around, hoping to get myself out of hearing range so the word of the lord could be heard. He was the lord, but I could never be his.

My grandma took me to pentecostal faith healers at tent revivals. They pulled out their entire bag of tricks, yet I continued to cough. I became a familiar face at those revivals. Every faith healer wanted to take a crack at fixing me. My orange afro, thick glasses, eye patch and left-handedness screamed, “the devil’s child,” and their treatment of me became openly hostile when my body refused to be healed.

As bad as the faith healers treated me, it was the “alter calls” that sealed my fate with the lord. It was expected of children around 7 or 8 to go forward in the church to get saved. I always went after I saw other kids going up there, wanting to fit in somehow, even with my bullies and tormentors. They would fall to their knees, crying and praising the lord for giving them his gift of the holy spirit. I went up over and over again, hoping that would happen for me, but it never did. At some point, the embarrassment of it became too much and I started faking it. After that, I faked everything. I could never really tell, because there was no real me. How could a young child, so openly rejected by God, ever do any better than learning to fake it well?

When you start off fake, you stay that way. You have to because your real self never came into being. I knew that I was bad and evil, but mostly, just never worth anything. In watching the Sinead O’Connor documentary, she talked about her mom telling her, “you’re nothing, you’re nothing” ad nauseum. Mostly, my mom simply ignored my existence. As long as I stayed in my room, never spoke unless spoken to first by an adult, and became as diminutive as possible, I could live alone in a fantasy world and continue to be fed and housed.

My piano teacher believed in me far more than I believed in myself. She started making me her recital’s final act when I was around 10 or 11, and her older students resented me terribly. As for those recitals, I walked to my piano teacher’s house, then rode with her back and forth. My parents didn’t attend.

As long as I could play pieces that let me fly across the keyboard at top speed, losing myself in the movement, I did well. When I was around 13 or 14, she forced The Warsaw Concerto on me. It was 10 pages long and full of strong, full chords, which had to be memorized. During practice one day, my dad, who rarely spoke to me, yelled from the living room - “Can’t you ever play anything without making mistakes?” From that day forward, I could not. I tried making mistakes at the beginning of every song to get them out of the way, but that was a dismal failure. It’s hard to play mind tricks when you don’t actually have a self.

On stage in front of a hundred people, I started, faltered, started and faltered. After 3 or 4 failed attempts, I got off stage, ran down the aisle, out the door, and passed out on the hot concrete outside. I never played within earshot of another person after that, except for a brief period in my mid-30’s when I played in front of my babies. My babies, who I’m sure consider themselves motherless and are probably right about that. I didn’t know what a mother was, and the lack of that knowledge couldn’t be faked.

There is more - so much more. No one wants to hear about any of it and I understand. A friend I once had on MySpace and then Facebook, called my writing “an attempt to turn whining into an art form.” I bet Sinead heard something similar once or twice. The world tells us to straighten up and fly right, as if that can be done. “Just decide to be happy, and you will be.” What that actually sounds like is, “shut up and keep your problems to yourself,” along with a hefty dose of shame. I can do that. I can’t not do that. I don’t know the words to say most of the things I’ve been through in this shell of a life. I wish I had fought for myself more, but I didn’t know it was an option.