CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: HOW FAMILY MATTERS ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY

Today, as all right-thinking people know, is St. Patrick's Day, an occasion to celebrate the accomplishments of the greatest ethnic group on Earth.

I am not biased.

But while the rest of the country is getting its Irish up, I can't help but think about the other half of my ethnic makeup -- my mother's family, a fiery combination of Spanish and Yugoslavian, settled down Bolivia way.

My mother's father, Anton, owned a construction company in La Paz, where he had settled after World War I decimated Serbia, his homeland.

He traveled to Spain in the late 1920s on a contract and there met my grandmother, Olga.

He and my grandmother married and moved back to La Paz, where they had three children: My mother, Maria, and her two younger sisters, Olgita and Delia.

My grandmother's appendix burst while she was in labor with Delia, and she died in childbirth. That was in about 1936.

My mother and her sisters went to convent schools -- and not the same ones. My mother kept getting expelled for mouthing off to the nuns.

After my grandfather died in 1953, Olga and Delia married -- one to a jeweler, one to a high-ranking police official. My mother decided to support herself, and got one of the few jobs available to a woman in that place and time. She was a tour guide for a travel agency.

It wasn't glamorous, but she did meet my father, then a staff sergeant with the U.S. Air Force stationed in Bolivia to train the Bolivian air force on aircraft maintenance.

Mom came to America to marry my father, still in the Air Force, in 1955. When they married, Pop had $5 in his wallet, and my mother had about $15. He jokes that he married her for her money.

When they were first married, Mom and Pop moved every six weeks or so.

Between the moves and the mail (or lack thereof) from the U.S. to Bolivia, my mother lost touch with her sisters. She last heard from them in about 1966. Dad retired from the Air Force in 1968, and we moved to St. Louis.

My mother talked a lot about Bolivia while I was growing up. I half-dreaded her stories because I suspected they might signal she wasn't happy with us, and because someone always caught cholera or typhoid or something and died.

In 1988, my mother went back to Bolivia for a few weeks. She'd made it through her first round with breast cancer and decided she missed La Paz enough to want to see it once more.

She didn't find her sisters. A man who'd worked at the jeweler's told her the family had disappeared during one of the coups of the early 1970s. Rumor had it the family had taken the jewelry stock and run off to Argentina.

The policeman fell out of favor with some dictator, and his family fled for Peru, my mother learned from an old school friend.

She never tried to trace them, figuring they'd changed their names or had left without papers and couldn't be found.

My mother died in 1992. We were going through her things when it suddenly struck me that I have an entire family -- aunts and uncles and cousins -- that I've never met, and probably never will.

The O'Farrells are all pretty much joined at the hip; my brother and sister and I don't stay separated for long. My mother worked very hard to cultivate that attitude, probably because of what happened with her sisters.

I think about my mother a lot, and wonder about my aunts, whether they're still alive or not, what their children are like. More than anything, I think I've learned how much family -- or the absence thereof -- shapes my environment and my attitude.

Even if they aren't Irish.

Peggy O'Farrell is a copy editor for the Southeast Missourian.