Tag: Irish American

Happy Birthday Hellraiser

Happy Birthday Hellraiser

The long call of a spring robin woke me from a dream about Mother Jones. She was organizing my group to protest the nightmarish abolition of women’s rights, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. 

“I don’t march anymore. I can’t run!” I muttered in half-sleep.

I tugged to escape her visitation as I was tugging the covers to get up and contemplate the robin’s daybreak anthem. The common backyard robin is unusual along the Lake Michigan shoreline where I live. Its song is one of the few teachings I remember from my own mother. 

I’d been to a Mother Jones birthday party at the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago. Mary Harris Jones, born in County Cork in 1837, immigrated when she was ten years old. Her husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867. Four years later her dress-making shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Undaunted, this fierce, five-foot-tall Irish American became an organizer for workers’ rights, particularly the United Mine Workers.

On May 1, 1886, there was a general strike for the eight-hour workday which led to the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Mary Harris Jones declared her birth date as May 1, to honor the Haymarket Martyrs. Her exact birthday is unknown. Most records of peasants born in western and southern Ireland were lost or destroyed during the Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1852). This is true of my own ancestry. 

Mother Jones helped coordinate major strikes in the coal mines and on the railroads where my great-grandfather and great-uncles worked. Her protest marches included children who wore banners saying, “We Want to Go to School and Not to the Mines.” They could easily have been my relatives.

Women activists belittled her lack of commitment to women’s suffrage.  She said “you don’t need the vote to raise hell!”  Jones believed it was more important to advocate for the working class—black, white, men, women and children—than to support women’s causes alone.

Like Mother Jones’ family, my father’s forebearers were discriminated against due to their immigrant status, their Catholic faith, and their Irish heritage. The shame of the Irish hung heavy in their Kentucky and Indiana homes. But still, my father, fresh out of law school in the late 1930s, working for the United Mine Workers, wrote the first union pension legislation in the United States.  And, family lore supposes his father, my grandfather, was a union organizer on the railroad.

When Mary Harris Jones turned 60, she began calling herself “Mother” Jones. She dressed in matronly black, wore old-fashioned hats and referred to the laborers she helped as “her boys.”

When I was 60, I took up offense for workers in my office. Wage inequality, discordant work assignments, and unfair discipline reeked of cruelty. In the end, I got canned, but their jobs were secured. 

Like the robin wake-up call at dawn, Mother Jones calls from the graveyard and wakes me to the oppressed and wronged.

I bow to her. In gratitude.

Happy Birthday Mother Jones.

Irish DNA: Inheriting A Stigma

Irish DNA seems to have a gene actively predisposed to alcoholism though there’s no scientific evidence that it’s hereditary.

The first ugly secret in my family is that my twenty-three year old mother, Agnes Donnelly Ryan Burke, was drunk in the Georgetown Inn in Washington with my father at the time her mother died. She wasn’t located until the next day. Later that year my parents were married in Key West where my father, Bill, flew reconnaissance planes across the Florida Straits to Cuba. Their married life began with Bill spending two weeks in the brig after a drunken brawl over Agnes.

Alcohol addiction begins with an immature reaction to the emotional and physical pain of adverse childhood and young adult experiences. When and why did Agnes and Bill cross over from heavy drinking to alcohol disease? Bill’s mother died when he was three so he had early trauma. Agnes was prescribed Guinness Stout when she was twelve for anemia so she had early permission. Their chaotic, calamitous alcoholic marriage intruded on the childhoods of my three sisters and me but as far as I know we are not all alcoholics. We all manifest common characteristics of growing up in an alcoholic home: fear of emotions, conflict avoidance, perfectionism, compulsive behavior, depression, melodrama, overreaction to change, and the denial of all these traits and their connection to alcoholism.

In the forty-one years I’ve been in Alcoholics Anonymous, there have been ongoing, persistent discussions, “Is it hereditary? Is it a disease?” Since the1900’s the language describing alcoholism has screamed out to the non-addicted populace, WE CAN’T HELP IT. The world has been given plenty of messages to enable it to accept us alcoholics as normal people with medical problems. Currently, the community that studies these questions is
untitledpromulgating the idea that addiction is a biological disorder from a dysfunctional brain – not inherited and certainly not a moral failing.

This past year I had coffee after church with a new acquaintance. In swapping little tales about ourselves she told me she had a match.com date who told her he was in AA. “Isn’t that disgusting?” she said. I abruptly excused myself saying I had forgotten to walk my dog and had to run right home.

Alcoholism was shameful before I was born, shameful in my family growing up, shameful in myself, and shameful now. All the work that has gone into trying to change negative thinking against alcoholics has not shifted the stigma one iota. Two million recovering alcoholics still sneak off to life-changing, life-saving AA meetings, keeping their recovery a shameful secret.

Agnes died of alcoholic brain syndrome (wet brain) when she was seventy. Bill joined AA when he was forty-five and stayed sober for 35 years until he died. He was proud to be part of a recovery community and thrived by helping others. But he never felt as though he quite measured up to the world outside of the AA fellowship. He wasn’t secretive about his alcoholism, nonetheless, the stigma hounded him until the end.