St. Patrick rid Ireland of the snakes which were eating all of the potatoes. The fat cats were going to shut down the potato mines so he got together with U2 and Seamus Heany and put on a racy burlesque show to raise cash and morale for Catholics. Divinely inspired, the boys decided to strip to their "staffs" which spooked the snakes into beating oceanic retreat.

St. Patrick wasn't even Irish. He was captured and enslaved during the chaos of the Toledo War and taken via the Great Lakes all the way to Ireland. It was his beautiful singing voice and orange hair that set him apart from the other slaves. "God loves a ginge," said the nuns at the orphanage. And they raised him to be a good potato miner and a slow, sensual kisser.

No one likes being called white, it's boring. Where's our green and ginger? Where's my right to name myself? I mean, I'm not Irish, but I'm not just another white American lady, with my NPR and my coffee. I have a story and a sense of myself that takes up more than an "I Love the 90s" Special, it threads back to carpets in Ireland, drunks dead in gutters, women dead in bathtubs, basically lots of dead people, inappropriate jokes, and rousing music that makes everyone cry. We are loud in groups, also, as a rule.

What do I do when I want to feel more special than I already feel? I think about these stories that culminate in mine, and most years previous to this one, I would have gone out and gotten drunk to help shoot off the sparks these thoughts create. It's the Irish thing to do, it's our one flaw, we just love to live too much, we live to love and laugh, and we try to fly out of our bodies and workaday lives into greater, richer lives.

But I have decided not to drink again, ever, to remain shackled to sobriety and a story that daily begins and ends with me. You realize you are not that Irish-American, even: you don't have eight kids and you went to college twice and your mom isn't the crippled nasty drunk leaching out your life but a tragic story you haven't seen in years. They had her intervention on St. Patrick's Day three years ago and then went out for beers. You didn't go because you had moved on so hard. You should stop pretending, it's unseemly, you don't want to be just another voice yelling "I'm this." First time ever, you don't know what to do on St. Patrick's Day.

Sunday you get the news that Kevin has had a stroke. Except that Kevin is 25 and in good health and coming to visit this weekend, and we are going to wear green and be Irish-American Cousins together.

This St. Patrick's Day, add another layer to the paint on the walls, peeling and damp. I want to be honest about cultural tropes and poisonous family myths and I want to punish myself for my happiness and my single-minded turning to the light. I want to cut them out because I don't deserve or want all the richness of having a family and a history. Except all of this is blah blah and bullshit because this is how I know Kevin, by being born his cousin, into this family.

Kevin is going to be fine, walking and talking again. He's a stoner and a science fiction reader, tumbles with children and loves alike. He's going to be fine not because he's a fighter--he is not--but because our family fights. They sweep us up in their blurry Cathoholic hysteria and we get to look back at it and mock it.

This St. Patrick's Day I'll be moving on from the Patty Downeys, the Shane MacGowans, and the alcoholic man-boy crushes of near past and concerning myself with Kevin. Kevin is a great guy beset by a tragedy, not a narcissist courting constant immolation. Kevin is an all around quality fellow and I'm sending mad unicorn vibes his way until I get to Ohio and cure him with the world's most powerful joke. Kevin: he's a great Irish guy.