THE CRUEL MOTHER
There are many relationships that were important to Sinéad O'Connor. As she says in Rememberings, 'I have four children by four different fathers, only one of whom I married, and I married three other men, none of whom are the fathers of my children.' But though many of these relationships are reflected in the songs there are two that stand out very clearly - the relationship with God and the relationship with her mother. The two come together in this story from Rememberings:
'I love Jesus because He appeared in my head one night when my mother had me on the kitchen floor. I was naked and had cereal and powdered coffee all over me. My mother was saying all this scary stuff, and I was curled up so she could kick me on my bottom. Suddenly, there Jesus was in my mind, on a little stony hill, on His cross. I never asked Him to come; He just arrived. He had on a long white robe and blood was flowing from His heart all the way down His robe and down the hill and onto the ground and then onto the kitchen floor and into my heart. He said He would give me back any blood my mother took and that His blood would make my heart strong. So I just focused on Him. When my mother was finished with me, I lay on the floor until I knew she had closed her bedroom door. Then I tidied up all the stuff she’d thrown about and set the table for breakfast.'
It's not difficult to think it's her mother she has in mind when she sings in 'You cause so much sorrow':
'Why must you always be around?
Why can't you just leave it be?
It's done nothing so far but destroy my life.
You cause as much sorrow dead
As you did when you were alive.'
But we learn from Rememberings that it's also her mother she has in mind when she sings, in 'Feel so different':
I should have hatred for you
but I do not have any
and I have always loved you
Oh you have taught me plenty
And most surprising she says 'The huge single from the album, my cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was a song I was always—and am always—singing to my mother. Every time I perform it, I feel it’s the only time I get to spend with my mother and that I’m talking with her again.' 'Nothing compares 2 U' is a love song if ever there was one.
The album in question is her second, I do not want what I do not have and in Rememberings she tells the story of how the title song came about. She talks about herself and her sister Éimear (later curator of the Crawford Gallery in Cork) and how they used to spend hours wandering round Dublin begging because they were afraid to go home:
'We did anything to stay out because only battering would happen at home. Some nights we just rode the bus from the first stop to the last and back in the hope that Mother would be asleep when we got home. We were a strange mixture: middle-class kids with filthy clothes that had not been washed for years, begging. We were good at begging; we had to be or we would have starved.'
After she died:
'I went to see a medium and my mother came through. My mother asked my sister to forgive her for what she had done to all of us. But my sister would not forgive her. And while I understood this, it made me very, very sad for my mother’s soul. I was so young and didn’t know any better. That night I had a dream in which my mother came to me for the first time since she had died a year and a half earlier. In the dream, I told my mother I was sorry that Éimear couldn’t forgive her. My mother said, “I do not want what I haven’t got.” What my mother meant was that she didn’t deserve my sister’s forgiveness and that she knew she didn’t deserve it so that I shouldn’t feel sorry for her.'
What she does with the phrase is interesting:
'I'm walking through the desert
and I'm not frightened though it's hot
I have all that I requested
and I do not want what I have not got.
'I have learned this from my mother
See how happy she has made me
I will take this road much further
though I know not where it takes me'