Pope John Paul the Second visited Ireland the year I was born, and it was possibly the single happiest moment in my Mother’s life. She never said that directly, of course, because to do so would earn the chastisement of my second oldest sister, Brigid, the only one of us eight who was ever allowed to speak back to my Mother. True to the atmosphere of the 70s in which she was a child, Brigid developed a firm distaste for Catholicism and hated my Mother’s moral fixation. Ironically, Brigid was also the only of us girls named after a Catholic saint.

The same can not be said for the boys, all three of whom were named after Catholic saints –or so my Mother always said. Despite the coincidence of the years, my twin brother was not named after John Paul, a name already given to our older brother. My mother would grin knowingly when telling neighbors all of her boys were named after saints. When the point was made that John Paul was not a saint, my Mother would nod, “Aye, but ‘e will be, doncha know?”

Perhaps by my birth, my Mother had run out of names she favored. My brother became Sebastian Patrick Ochiern, the full name of which my Mother enunciated whenever he came into question, while the rest of us referred to him simple by Sebastian, or Bast were we feeling playful. And I became Guinevere Rose Ochiern, fourteen years later to be changed to Guinevere Rose Flynn. I was mostly called Guin or Ginny, or even Nev by my aged and beloved grandfather, but the fact remained that I was Guinevere. My Mother shunned all such nicknames for me. I never did learn the story of my name, nor why I was named for an adulteress, though the irony in hindsight is not lost on me. Whatever the case, I took extra care in naming my children.

The closest Pope John Paul the Second came to my family’s home on the outskirts of the small fishing town of Kinsale, Ireland, was Limerick, a good day’s travel north. Being seven months along with two babies and all, my Da forbid her to visit. However, my Mother never was one to be deterred, much less by her husband who never could do anything more than beat her a bit, and never dared to do even that while she was with child. So when my Da set out before the first rays of sun that morning in late September (my Mother never could nail down which date precisely it was), my Mother rolled her fat self into the back of the wagon because my Da had taken the car to the shore, set the rains in my brother Timothy’s hands, and off she and all my siblings went to the train station. It cost a pretty pence, and my Mother never actually laid eyes on Pope John Paul the Second, though she never admitted this outright. My eldest sister, Aisling, who was fourteen and two weeks and ever as devout as my Mother, insisted for always after that there was simply something “orgasmic” about being in the same city as a pope. I’m sure she had no idea at the time what the word “orgasmic” meant, no doubt having only heard it whispered in the bathroom of the poverty-stricken private Catholic school all eight of us attended. I’m sure she took it to mean only all things good in the world. Nevertheless, after learning the true meaning of the word years later, I snickered each time I thought of Pope John Paul the Second, whom I have only ever respected. Even after coming to accept that I would never be a good Catholic girl.

Sebastian came into the world with a bolt of raven black hair, whereas I entered a fireball of red curls, which would fortunately settle down in time. No amount of tears, however, could prevent the tugs on my ringlets that I was subject to as the youngest of eight, or the teasing nicknames that cruel schoolchildren sent my way in the breakyard. My only defender in those young years were my brothers, Sebastian and John Paul. Timothy, as the oldest boy, had far more important matters at hand than to concern himself with the doings of his younger siblings. At eight, he was ready for the working world and already had shifty attendance at school due to joining my Da out on the boat. My sisters could not have cared less for me were I a mangy stray kitten wandering in and tracking mud on their freshly mopped floor.

Ah, but I am biased against them.

I remember my Mother as tired. Born a city girl, she had married my father in 1965, at the old age of sixteen. I never have been sure I knew the true story of their meeting, for my Mother only ever said that my father sailed by on his boat as she was visiting the coast with her parents, and she knew my father was the man for her. This sounds well and good until you take into account that my father yearly bought my Mother a new dress or a new scarf in April to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and my sister Aisling, born in 1965, yearly celebrated her birthday in August. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to notice this, but as John Paul used to say, “Doncha be questionin’ me Mather now, ya hear?” If we were raised with anything, it was a strong sense of piety and downright respect for our matriach, and occasionally our patriarch.

And of course a deep respect and equally deep loathing for money. The decade following my birth brought about even harder economic times –for all of Ireland, not just my family, though we were definitely among those hit hard. To hear my Da and my Grandfather speak of it, taxes rose by two hundred percent, Fianna Fáil himself came to our doorstep to wring the pennies from our children’s throats with his own bony fingers, and those damn bloody British were trying their hardest to send us into another famine. Hating us simply wasn’t enough and they were trying to finish the job they had started in the 1840s.

I wasn’t excessively happy as a child, but neither was I depressed. Money troubles meant luxuries were rare, but we were grateful children at the very least, happy for our peppermints and oranges and ginger snap cookies at Christmas. I loved my mother at the time, and I loved my father, though possibly this was because I knew no better or different.

My sisters bullied me, but Sebastian and John Paul and I were as tight as three siblings could be. Before Sebastian and I started school, we would bother my mother all day until it was time for John Paul, who was only two years our senior, to come home with our other siblings. Mother would innocently remark that “t’e day grows old, me babes,” and Sebastian and I would take off for where the poorly paved road turned away from the ocean. It was as far as we were allowed to go without someone older, and even then we had to hold hands, something that never struck us as unfortunate. There, perched on a splinter-ridden wooden fence, we would crane our necks and stretch our eyes to see who could spot the bus first. When John Paul would step off the bus, lagging behind Aisling, Brigid, Colleen, and Evelyn, Sebastian and I would cheer as loudly as I’m sure the Irish cheered for the real John Paul on that October day in 1979. We’d walk with him back to the house and listen to his tales of school with an unearthly fascination, unable to truly comprehend this magical building of learning he spoke of.

Pre school days, my mother doted on Sebastian and I, I believe. We would help her with the chores, the three of us would eat lunch looking out at the water, and then she would stroke Sebastian’s hair and rock him in the chair while I sang and danced to make them smile. When the older children returned home, we were no longer my mother’s babies, though. We were just more of the brood and would run after John Paul, knocking chairs over, getting into pastries, disappearing out of doors for hours at a time. My mother didn’t bother looking for us. “Yeh’ll always be findin’ yehr way ‘ome, I know.”

Then school began for Sebastian and I, and our family suffered several changes at once. First, my mother’s mother died and my mother’s father moved in with us. I loved having him around, but he and my da never did get along, and my grandfather seemed to resent my da for his having to live out in Kinsale. He hated the smell of fish and even as much as I idolized him as a child, I remember being utterly confused as to how such a wonderful old man could say such terrible things about my father who, though never making any claims to be the brightest of them, was nothing if not an earnest fisherman.

The next was that my mother decided the time was optimal for her to begin working again. She and my da got into several grand rows about it during which he accused her of wanting money to fund her plans of leaving. These were simply more conversations printed into my brain that I didn’t understand until I was older. How, after all, could my mother leave my father? Where would she go? How could he be mad when she couldn’t be gone long? She had all of us children, after all. Maybe she would go to town, but she would find her way home, just like she always said.

For better or for worse, my mother never did leave my da, and it was perhaps her job that saved their marriage. He finally agreed to let her accept a position –or rather realized he couldn’t stop her– as a receptionist at the doctor’s office downtown. She loved having a job, feeling like she was doing something for herself at long last. I remember sitting on the bed and listening to Aisling and Colleen complain about how my mother had abandoned us and turned into “a working woman,” something apparently to be ashamed of. Brigid maintained that everyone should get a job, that maybe the institution of marriage should be done away with entirely, and women could live on their own and support themselves. Evelyn adored my mother blindly and cried at the slightest criticism. Later, much later, Evelyn was diagnosed as mildly autistic, and it shed new light on what we had always just assumed were her quirks. Like her deathly fear of ribbons and her refusal to hold a candle.

The third great change, of course, was that Sebastian and I entered school. Our approaches to learning were vastly different. Sebastian hated the very idea of being confined within four walls for so many hours a day, writing sentences and mathematical equations –an idea that had at once elicited countless daydreams and games of ‘school’. He made faces behind the teacher’s back, pretended not to know the answers when called upon, and made a habit of dipping little girls’ ribbons into the inkwells set out on our desks every morning. I couldn’t have been more different, and I hated him for our differences while we were in school. In all accounts a know-it-all and a brown-noser, I couldn’t possibly understand the effects of peer pressure on a young boy whose father took very little interest in him. I eagerly did all assignments, sought praise from the teachers to the point of obsession, and took even the tiniest speck of criticism far too harshly. In a family of eight children, it wasn’t easy to get praise and attention from my parents, but earning perfect marks or bringing home a note of praise earned me a hug and a grin and a night listening to my parents wish my brothers and sisters could be as avid students as I.

My grandfather would sit with me on the side of the road facing the water and tell me about his schooldays and how bad he felt that he hadn’t tried harder. A good education was worth more than anything, he told me, and he liked to tell me that I was smarter than my brothers. He would tease that I got his red hair –though I never saw a color on his head besides white or grey– and my grandmother’s brains, and perhaps nothing but my eyes from my father’s parents. My monster brother Sebastian was my father’s child, he would say, but he secretly adored Sebastian as much as any of us did.

As much as I hated Sebastian inside school, though –and even John Paul shied away from his out-of-control antics, often my only companion since I didn’t make friends very easily– we reverted to the best of mates as soon as we left the schoolyard. He would help me with my history and I would help him with his mathematics, and then we would run outside, hand-in-hand to stir up an ant mound, or chase the birds out of the road, or hunt for snakes to feed the dog.

As miserable as I occasionally felt, realizing that I didn’t have any little girl friends to come sit on my bed and brush hair and gossip with the way my sisters did, I was simultaneously as free and happy as could be. I have this image in my head of me and Sebastian and John Paul, and maybe Evelyn sometimes too, running through the high grass near our house, my hair flying out behind me as my brothers chased me. I had this unhealthy fear of stepping on crabs. I never actually saw any, but occasionally my brothers would catch them in the tidal pools and bring them home. We’d watch them run around in a box until my mother would insist we throw them out or she would cook them for dinner. Sometimes I wondered if the same threat applied to us.

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