Family Resemblance

By Molly McGlynn

*****

It’s May in Dublin and suspiciously and unrelentingly sunny. I’m here visiting extended family and looking at potential wedding venues with my fiance, the latter activity to be filed under “the promises,” or things that make me feel like I'm playing dress up in my own life. Chicken or beef and cost-per-person aside, I am still an alcoholic.  I walk into an AA meeting north of the river in Dublin. It’s more of a life or death type of venue, an oppressively small, white, windowless basement room. All the AA slogans have Russian translations under them. I try to discreetly shuffle into a seat, hoping they won’t notice that I’m not from here, at least in a geographical sense.  I could have been. The room smells of damp feet and old cigarette smoke ingrained in unwashed clothing. I think of what a bitch I look like holding my Rent-the-Runway sweater sleeve over my nose.  I think about Catherine, my aunt who died of complications related to her alcoholism at forty-six, and what would’ve happened if she had stayed in the stench of the room and didn’t run. I want to run, but I don’t. These are my people. This is my home.

The Irish format involves a much more ping-pongy, staccato rhythm that feels more alive than American meetings. I feel like I am in a Roddy Doyle book. There is no hand raising, just speaking when it feels right, not unlike at the pub. I listen to shares but can only understand about a third of it, the North Dublin accent’s speed and slang firing past my comprehension. I hear something about Sinn Féin and prison and a sister who hanged herself and a Captain Morgan’s bottle of rum kept in the fridge, and a mother’s wake and a rehab baby and a government worker who told the sober man without a home that he’d be more likely to find housing if he were on drugs. A man with face tattoos has had his life changed by a gratitude list. We say the serenity prayer, and I sneak out and drive back to the hotel. I wonder if my parents ever walked down the same streets before they left for Canada with my sisters, the cold place I was born and came to love.

*****

Catherine was my late mother’s youngest sister like I am in my family, and being around her felt like the moment at the top of a rollercoaster. She smelled like Elnett hairspray and cigarettes. I loved the way she applied frosty blue eyeshadow in the mirror, talking about a boyfriend she met in rehab while I sat on the side of the tub watching her, just learning myself to grasp the powers of sex and hairspray and makeup. I felt like her confidante. 

The timeline of my memory can’t be trusted, but once as a kid, I remember sitting behind a two-way mirror with my mother and a social worker, watching Catherine interact with her young daughter she lost custody of due to her drinking. I remember my mother’s anguish radiating off her, holding herself back from coming in to try and save everyone in the room—everyone besides herself. I watched Catherine crouch down to her daughter’s level and offer her a book. I saw love. I saw her weep when it was time to say goodbye. My family has had too many goodbyes between mothers and daughters. 

But my favorite memory with Catherine involves Pierce Brosnan.  Catherine was living in my grandmother’s tiny row house, and after watching her enshroud herself in a halo of hairspray and tell me about wanting to go to cosmetology school, she brought me downstairs and announced to my mother that we were going to “the cinema.” My mother tensed up and softly denied her request. I was furious. But pleasssssse Mum. I got my wish. Catherine and I left, and I felt like we were an intergenerational Thelma & Louise.

Even with her undercurrent of sadness, this woman was peak glamor to me. We stopped at a convenience store and she came out with skinny cigarettes. Hers dangled from her mouth as she asked, “Don’t you get started on this filthy habit.” She inhaled deeply, and I shook my head, yet filed it under Extremely Sexy and Rebellious Activities.

She took me to The Thomas Crown Affair. I clutched the armrest as I watched Renee Russo and Peirce Brosnan fuck on a staircase, an image I also filed away in my brain. We came home, and my mother was sitting up, clutching a cup of tea, relieved I was home safe. It took me years to understand that my mother knew she was a drunk. But to me, all she felt was alive. She was my portal to something burgeoning in me. Catherine was the first person who treated me like an equal and I adored every minute of it. We were more similar than I thought at the time.

*****

At dinner at my cousin’s the next night, I told her I’m sober now and that I went to my first Dublin AA meeting. When I told her where it was, she laughed, noting that I chose the roughest part of Dublin I could find. My -ism, unfortunately, demands I choose the most extreme option. This is recovery.

I asked her about Catherine, specifically if she died alone. She tells me she didn’t, that her mother, my other aunt Deidre, was with her. She tells me of her mother’s anguish after she had to give Catherine’s daughter, our cousin, away to a foster family after raising the baby for the first six months of her life. Catherine was too unwell to raise her. We talk about the fact that if either of our mothers, now both dead, had adopted Catherine’s baby, one of us would now have a young sister, twice motherless. We are all motherless now, at least in a biological sense. A loving family adopted Catherine’s daughter in a rural part of Ireland and we hope that she is happy and loved. She will never know that someone saw her mother down at the docks in the last days of her drinking, selling her body to feed the hungry ghosts that took her life. 

*****

The first time I got drunk as a teenager in New Jersey, I got very drunk. I threw up red Gatorade that my mother thought was blood. The next day she told me that I could not drink, in a rare tone she had that I understood as “do not fuck with this.”  She told me I had the thing that Catherine had and she could see it. I buried this observation and carried on with my life and my drinking, though every time I saw a photo of a young Catherine, I could see nothing by my own bright blue-eyed, freckled, squishy-cheeked face in hers. I saw my charisma and fragility in the way she moved through the world. She looked so hollow and bloated at my mother’s funeral, perhaps jealous of the finality of physical death. 

*****

The next day, I brought my fiance to the industrial, grey-toned town outside of Dublin, where my mother and her siblings (and Pierce Brosnan) grew up. The severed head of Saint Oliver Plunkett is displayed in a Church there, terrorizing both the old, young, and in between. I did not want to see that this time or ever again. I knocked on the door of a tiny semi-detached house in desperate need of a powerwash, where my grandparents raised their four children. Once it was five, but then it was four.

A man opened, rightly suspicious, but when I told him this was the house where my late mother grew up, he let us in. His name is James. I told him that was my grandfather’s name. I got the sense it’s now a men’s sober living house or subsidized housing. We stood tightly at the bottom of the steep staircase that my mother once told me Catherine fell down so many times that the paramedics said they wouldn’t come anymore.

James led us through the tiny sitting room where my grandmother used to sit by the window and read the newspaper so closely it left ink on her nose. She always said that she never let a lack of schooling get in the way of her education. I wish my phone left some sort of ink on my fingers, some tactile payoff for mindless scrolling.

The room is now a bedroom plastered with Elvis memorabilia. We landed in the tiny galley kitchen with a big window that opened to the modest backyard. My grandfather used to have a greenhouse filled with red roses he tended to as lovingly as his children. The yard is now empty and flowerless. We thanked him and left.

We walked around the block to a florist across from the cemetery, and I bought a couple of loose red-stem roses to leave on the grave under the names of my grandparents, mother, and Catherine. When I was at my cousin’s, I learned that Catherine’s date of death on the family tombstone was wrong; my aunt was juggling too many deaths that year. Nothing is funnier to me than a typo written on your tombstone. I wonder what typos and subsequent jokes my loved ones could put on mine.

Nevertheless, I stand solemnly and do the sign of the cross, a remnant of my Catholic upbringing. My fiance steps back and lets me weep as I clear away a dead bouquet my sister left a few months prior. I collect a handful of pebbles on the grave and put them into my pocket. My fiance puts his arm around me and asks if I want to introduce him to my mother. I cry, and I cannot say a single thing. She is not here. I am, and we are, and she is not. This is all that I know.

*****

My fiance and I continued our trip to Ireland. It was glorious. This is my first time in Ireland where I do not drink Guinness, though I found a NA version. I drank it while I sat alone on a hill in Connemara, looking at an impossibly beautiful view that my camera couldn’t come close to capturing. I feel safe and at peace here. I thought about how my cousin calls cilantro “coriander” and her laugh that I hear my Mum in, and the red roses and the sun and the gray gravel and the saint’s severed heads and the faces of those that look like mine. I pull out my phone and see that I have been sober for sixteen months and twenty-six days, and I feel the ancestors in my blood sigh in relief.

*****

Molly McGlynn is a writer and director of film and television. Her second feature film, Bloody Hell, premiered at SXSW in March 2023. Find her at @mollymarymcglynn or mollymarymcglynn.com.

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