I Continue this battle.  I do it for my paternal great grandfather, about whom little is known, except the worst or the essential facts about his life.  He was a raging alcoholic, an abusive scoundrel, a woodsmen who didn’t generally provide for his four daughters but did often beat the living daylights out of my great grandmother.  My grandmother, I am told, was his favorite because she stood up to him, staying by her mother while he beat her.  He died dirty and alone.  I wonder about him, this dangerous, troubled ghost.  What happened to him?  Something must have cut him in two, to make him do the things he  did.  I don’t believe that babies are born broken.

I continue this battle for his daughter, the grandmother I never met and didn’t grieve for until I became a mother myself, and I began to long to sit at her kitchen table on four o’clock red winter nights, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, learning wisdom from a mother who bore far too many babies about how to strengthen my own premature baby.  Suddenly this red-haired, chain-smoking matriarch who died before I was born became a living, breathing loss.  I want to know what made her sad, what kept her up at night, what she knew about life and motherhood.  I dream about her sometimes. In my dreams she recognizes me, and comes towards me with arms outstretched.   In my dreams, I am familiar to her, and she tells me things I need to know.

I continue this battle for last of her children, my father, he of curly hair and a penchant for medieval literature, alternately blustering at his children and breathing their presence like air.  He has battled his demons, running marathons to get away from them, getting degrees to outsmart them, but never truly finding a way to settle in himself, knowing he gave birth to a son who seems to be alright and a daughter destined for the same torments, raging absurdly against the genetic injustice of it all. He didn’t mean for it to happen.  He wanted a little girl, and I was born, with black spikey hair and a temper and a brain that was always going to make life difficult.  It’s not his fault.  But I think he thinks it is.

And I continue this battle for my own child, for the babies she may mother some day.  Genetics are part of it.  Choices are all the rest.  I imagine my great grandfather, soothed with time out of his wild ways, walking around the block with my daughter, holding her hand.  I envision his filthy fingernails, his roughened palms, his tired eyes watching a new life dance into her future.  I want him to tell her that the darkness is over, that we have all fought, in our own way and to the best of our ability, to overcome it.  I want him to tell her that each generation has learned something about how to be well, that we pass it onto the next, that we all fought for ourselves in the best and only ways we knew how.

And then I want them to go and play at the park, this tortured great grandfather and baby of mine.  I  want them to laugh and hope and love, believe in a whole tomorrow.  It must be possible.   It has to be possible.   Peace, at some point, must  come to all of us.

Battle on, friends.   I will see you in September.