Mary Holland was my godmother. She was also my mother's best friend. My mother, who died almost five years ago, was Mary Cummins, also a journalist for The Irish Times.
Mary Holland and Mary Cummins: they were trailblazers, feminists and reporters on political conflicts and basic human suffering and inequality. They were part of a brave group of young women in the 1960s and 1970s, including Mary Maher, Nell McCafferty and Maeve Binchy, who helped to break the patriarchal stranglehold on Irish reporting and society.
They were also mothers - first and foremost as far as I was concerned. With the innocence of a baby, I had no comprehension of the extraordinary times and situation I was born into as the child of an unmarried mother in repressive 1970s Ireland. My own grandmother didn't know about me until I was almost two.
My mother was outspoken, wore long, flowing Laura Ashley dresses, chain-smoked, slapped on layers of foundation and blue eye shadow and, in my eyes, took every opportunity to mortify me at any given chance. No doubt at the time she was completely justified in having a go at the poor Garda just doing his job, trying to stop her parking inside the building, or marching unashamedly into the men's toilet in Switzers when the queue to get into the ladies was a mile long.
I remember trips to Cherish when I was tiny, taking away baby clothes for my dolls, thinking this was great, innocently depriving some poor young mother who could barely afford nappies.
What I wanted, together with the free clothes from Cherish, was to be collected from school by a smilingly benign mother in twinset and pearls with dinner on the hob and a father due home from work at six o'clock.
I knew from an early age that my father was English, lived in England and already had four children. He was a publisher and writer and didn't play any role in my upbringing, beyond regular letters.
There were a couple of highly tense and emotionally loaded meetings with him as I grew up. My mother made a very conscious decision to raise me on her own.
I envied Kitty and Luke Holland because they had a more regular family structure and Mary used to cook a traditional roast on Sunday evenings with Yorkshire puddings. My mother made spaghetti bolognaise, just spaghetti bolognaise. I think I may have some distant memory of shepherd's pie? Mary Holland would know, but she's gone now.
I aspired to be like the heroines I read about in my Mandy and Bunty magazines. I was surely adopted and maybe one day Mr and Mrs Boring would come to rescue me. No such luck.
The intensity of our relationship was such that if my mother were still alive, one of us would be in a straitjacket in St Pat's. Probably me. But for all our battling, I never doubted that she loved me, supported me and thought I could do anything.
She sent me to boarding school when I was eight - a very posh, West Brit place in Bray - and she used to recall fondly the first Friday she came to pick me up. I was waiting at the gate with my little blazer on, ready to go - so cute. I was waiting at the gate because I didn't want my new friends to see me getting into our rattle-trap of a car and my mother with her permed, vibrant red hair, hoop earrings and poncho. I was in twinset-and-pearls land for the first time and not about to advertise my difference.
I can remember one Saturday she had Mary Holland, Nell and some others over for the spaghetti. They were having a very lively discussion in the sitting-room of our tiny cottage. In a fit of adolescent pique I shouted at them all from my bedroom to shut up, just shut up! As you can imagine, my pathetic teenage rebellion died a death there and then.
I did manage to bring down the level of embarrassment to a more controllable one: when I was older I could walk away and pretend not to know her.
But I can fully appreciate now what a hugely difficult choice she made when she had me. I know that I fulfilled her life, in a way that she couldn't have allowed herself with anyone else.
How many other children went on CND marches, got taken to see a documentary about the underbelly of America (when I professed the desire to live there because it must be like Dallas), were encouraged to join the anti-apartheid movement and were taken to halting sites to meet Travellers? I am forever grateful for that education. I am so proud to be part of the lineage of the Marys - and of my own grandmother and aunt who have also passed away. They're all gone.
I hate the way my mother died: the four years of sickness, two types of lung cancer and breast cancer. My aunt died of liver cancer. Mary Holland died a most painful death, of scleroderma.
They lived hard and they died hard. They didn't deserve to die so hard. They weren't given the chance to slip gracefully into quiet dotage. But somehow I don't think it would have suited them. They would have been outspoken to the end.
With them is gone too soon the luxury of being able to uncover secrets naturally in the course of time. If I could have Mum back for a half-hour, I would ask her so much.
I miss these women every day, especially my mother. Her wit, black humour, raucous laugh, irreverence, intelligence, unconditional love and support. The fighting. Nobody fights better than she did. Now Mary Holland has gone too. It's not fair.