Nature Vs. Nurture

As a parent this is a topic that comes up a lot in parenting groups. How much are we responsible for the personalities that our children develop? Do we shape them as much as we would like to think? Would they grow up to be the same person if they were raised by someone else or in different circumstances?

From person experience I think that the blue print of who we are is laid out when we come into the world. I don't think that who we are is determined at all by the environment that we are born into or how we are raised. What we become is a little different. Someone who is born into a wealthy family has more opportunities than someone born to a poor family. That could make the difference between someone becoming a doctor and someone working at Wal-Mart scraping to make ends meet.

What about personality? How is that formed? Even those in street gangs have a "code of conduct", their own moral code, that they abide by. That moral code is important to them, even if mainstream society doesn't agree with it. Why? Were these the beliefs that their parents instilled in them or did they form them on their own?

Research would have you to believe that parents are a huge influence in what children believe. I also believe that statistics and research can be interpreted to mean what you want it to. I can draw from my own life on this. I don't know if I am the rule or the exception to the rule.

My parents divorced when I was around two years old. My mother moved to Ohio leaving my father behind in the Army stationed in Alaska. From that point on I didn't have any contact with my father while growing up. He wasn't a part of my life by my mothers' choice, not his. What my mother did basically amounted to parental kidnapping. Knowing my father was looking for me she kept me hidden and put up roadblocks when he came close to learning my location. Eventually he gave up trying.

My mother was an interesting person to say the least. She couldn't hold a relationship with anyone. Maybe I should rephrase that to say healthy relationship. She was married to my step-father for thirteen years. He was unstable, had multiple personalities and was very abusive to both me and my mother. My mother was equally abusive in her own way. She would do everything in her power to instigate fights with my step-father where he would hit her. Her motivation for this was to get sympathy and justification for cheating on him from others.

As early back as I can remember I was sent to Sunday school just where she could get rid of me for a few hours on the weekends. It wasn't something that I asked to do; it was something I was made to do. I never saw my mother step foot into a church aside from family weddings or funerals. She was very hypocritical in many ways. Until the age of nine my mother and step-father would go to the drive-in theater to see XXX porn. I think it was the only way either of them could get excited enough to have sex with each other. They both had so many issues and it was a bad match. They would drag me along to the theater because I would usually fall asleep in the car before the movies started. It didn't always work that way, and I can tell you at the age of seven, eight or nine things like that can seriously screw with you. I can say that my issues with Pinocchio stem from one of those movies.

On top of this very questionable behavior of my parents, my mother told me often that she didn't want me, that she wanted a boy and because I wasn't a boy I was a disappointment. In fact, my step-fathers family treated me the same way. I was an outsider for so many reasons, I was adopted and I was the only girl in that family for the longest time. My mother often told me that she stayed with my step-father because I needed a father. The truth of the matter is she wanted someone to support her and her addictions. First it was gambling then it was booze. When the booze came along so did the strange men. We are talking about others with alcohol problems, drug problems and other problems. One of the men that she brought home had a daughter my age and he would constantly hit on me. She didn't care. As long as she got what she wanted (sex and alcohol) all was good in her world. It didn't matter what I wanted or needed. I was nothing more than an inconvenience and a built in babysitter for my brother. There was even one occasion that my parents forgot to pick me up after a band event. No one showed up at the school to get me until 1:30am, four hours after we returned to the school.

My brother was born when I was sixteen. His father was a man she was having an affair with at the end of her marriage. This wasn't her first affair, there had been many, and she would rub it in my step-fathers face. This time she just happened to get pregnant and the guy was a real looser. To this day he wants nothing to do with his only child. Needless to say my brother has many issues. It doesn't matter though, because the second that my brother was born, he was my mothers' world. She finally had her boy. At one point she even told me that now that she had her son I would get nothing when she died, it was all going to him. Not that there was much to give besides some antique jewelry that has been in the family for generations. No idea it's worth.

The one thing that I never understood what that my mother always told me that I reminded her of my father. Until I was eight years old I was under the false impression that my step-father was my father. I was confused when she said this because I was nothing like my step-father. I was also nothing like her. I also didn't turn out anything like her. She served as the perfect example to me of how not to be. I am the exact opposite of her.

Fast forward to last year. For the first time in 33 years I got to see my father. It's not to hard to find a German man in Idaho when you finally figure out where to look. He was getting ready to hire a private detective to find me when I had come across his address on the internet and wrote him.

It has been interesting getting to know my father. What I find more interesting than anything is that I am exactly like him, and I am not talking about the appearance similarities you expect to see with families. We have the same attitude, the same view on life, and the same twisted sense of humor. I am exactly like a person that had no part in shaping my life but I share genetics with. Even more ironic is I have my grandmothers' obsessive love of baking cookies. It's the family cookie curse. This means at Christmas fifty plus types of cookies are made that there is no humanly way to have eaten before March, and that is after giving boxes of cookies to everyone you know.

What does all this say about the nature versus nurture argument? How can I be more like someone who had no part in shaping the person that I became than those who raised me? I think genetics play more of a part in who we are than what science gives credit for. Could there be any other explanation?