My grandmother has lived most of her life in denial. I am sure that when my grandmother tells me all the things my grandfather did to her that it took a long time for her to accept. For me this has always been an alien concept. In my immediate family we have always been the kind of people to acknowledge and push forward. My mother used to complain when the transition would not come easily she would say “Stop burying your head in the sand.” I was taught that acceptance and strength was the only way to meet any adversity.

My grandmother has never admitted my uncle's drug use or that my father ever had any problems of his own. My father once told me how my grandmother had done laundry and came in with a bag of wet weed and asked my father “Why does Craig have a packet of spinach in his pocket?” You can blame that on ignorance but in a way ignorance is a form of denial.

My father refused to be in denial of anything. He would often study hacking techniques so that he and my mother could sloop through my email and myspace accounts when I was a teenager. He figured out how to set parental blocks on the television. My father (and I blame this partially on the war and partially on his hyper vigilance) would wake up at any little noise in the night making it impossible to sneak out of the house.

I think in some ways this form of protection and acceptance was his way of making amends for the sins of his father and mother. He could not do as they had done. He could not turn a blind eye to the mistakes we made or the accomplishments. But I think my father has always been waiting for the hat to drop or the shit to hit the fan because he knows it will eventually.

This strained our relationship for many years. It took me a long time to figure out that this was one of his ways of saying he cared. When we would screw up he would punish us or tell us we were wrong. Nothing slipped by him or my mother. We never got away with anything. For a while I thought that he didn't love me that he thought, despite all my achievements and attempts to make him be proud, that I was a screw up.

However, years down the line I realized that all he was trying to do was give me the life and parent he had never had. His father cared about no one but himself. My father has labored intensively to sacrifice for us. His mother would deny that her child were anything but perfect. My father realized we were humans that had to live in the world and he prepared us for such.

If I have learned anything it is that the sins of the father shall be overcompensated for on the next generation. I have to give accolades to both my parents though. Despite all the muck and grit and dirt that their parents shoveled in heaps onto their lives they have learned to climb to the top of it all; to level it; to build something new out of it all; and then to give it to use a shiny splendid sculpture of the past.

When I look at my grandmother and see all the pain her denial has brought her. How she has had to live through things again and again and again. Forgetting then healing over then ripping the wounds anew I can see how that pain has been passed down and used to make something better.