When I was a kid my family had a cottage in Maine on the beach, and the summer I turned eleven, one morning I was walking by myself on this beautiful beach, with the vast sky above me, and waves crashes and the seagulls swooping, and it was low tide, so I was far from people. And I felt this massive huge connection to something, this vast energy, which as a 10 year old practicing Catholic, who had gone through all the rites of communion and confirmation and who went to mass every Sunday, I understood as God. And I walked with it and felt it in every part being, and eventually it manifested in very clear vision of what I was going to do with my life. I was going to become the first woman pope.
I didn't tell my family about this right away. I think I may have actually spent a couple of days planning it out, and visuallizing all the resistance I would face. I figured first I'd probably have to become a nun, but over time I would build a revolutionary army of nuns.
But eventually I told my mother, and she laughed a withering laugh that cut to the core of my soul.
I was so angry, because of course she was laughing at me. I didn't realize how she was laughing at the harshness of reality.
This week Sinead O'Connor died. 56, only a few years younger than me.
I remember how I felt when she tore up the picture of the Pope on SNL. I wasn't a fan of the pope, and I'd long since given up my fantasy. But it irritated me, because it felt immature and the wrong kind of danger. It was women taking themselves too seriously in a world where sometimes it's not really worth it.
But she gave her heart.
In the end that's what we need to remember about each other.
