(I should be sleeping, but) Nature v. Nurture
It's 3:30am, and I have to get up at 5 to drive an hour to my first prenatal appointment. Three hours ago I woke myself up out of a dead sleep by dreaming about an email I intended to send when I got up. (Yep. Dweeb alert!) Unable to get back to sleep, ruminating about how I would phrase my thoughts, I decided to just crank the email out and schedule-send. Unfortunately, I still couldn't get back to sleep. I started pondering the effects of nature vs. nurture. Having a similar feeling of phrasing rumination, here I am, dumping family lore to share my thoughts about the importance of nurture over nature! Maybe if I can put these thoughts on the screen, I'll be able to get back to sleep for an hour or so...
My mom had multiple kids with multiple men before she had me. Some in wedlock, some not, all starting life out in chaotic and unstable environments. Shortly after she had me, she met my adoptive dad and divorced my biological dad (who was her second husband, abusive, and at the time locked up). I have three younger siblings, all of whom are biological to my (adoptive) dad. There's a distinct difference between my older siblings and the younger ones. One thing we pretty much all have in common are mental health issues. Depression and anxiety are universal among the crew, while the older bunch have a much wider gambit of disorders.
My younger siblings and I (which my mom refers to as the "second set") were all raised together with Dad as the constant while life threw a bunch of variables at us. He raised us, often in Mom's absence for one reason or anther. He gave us stability, helped us build our moral foundations, and encouraged us to be true to ourselves. He wasn't perfect, but he was a great dad. My older siblings didn't have that influence, at least not as consistently as the second set. I wonder how their lives might have differed if they had.
The nature vs. nurture debate has stirred something in me from the moment I learned that my bloodline was different from my dad's. I've always rejected the idea that I'm much, if anything, like Bio. (I hate to refer to him as dad, even with the biological caveat.) I barely knew him for the first 16 years of my life (didn't even know he existed for the first 12), and the more I learned about him the less I wanted to do with him. He's a real scummy piece of work. The best thing he ever did for me was sign away his rights so Dad could take over, so I do give him that credit. If I had never learned about him, I might argue more for nature under the assumption that I've gotten what I've gotten from my dad biologically. There's no denying that I'm his kid, despite our genetic differences. We're just alike in so many ways. People even used to tell my mom that I looked like him, funnily enough. She'd just chuckle and nod along.
It's hard to say how different I would be without my dad's influence—sometimes I think it's unimaginable. But I've got a few examples to go off of. My older siblings lived through terrible traumas, and I wonder if those traumas manifested in the disorders that continue to plague their lives decades later. Or are their issues moreso the result of biological differences, based on their dads? I count myself as the evidence against this. The second set experienced our share of traumas. But most of the time, Dad was there to walk us through it. We never got the mental health treatment we probably all needed (how many kids did in the 90's and early aughts?), but we had a stable parent; someone we could trust implicitly. And we also had each other, little as we appreciated it at the time. Despite not having Dad's genes, and in fact having a very dark and disturbing ancestral history on my paternal side, I turned out more like my younger siblings than the older ones.
It would be silly to say that nature has no impact. Genetics is a fascinating thing, the depths of which I can hardly fathom. But I think in many, though not all ways, nature can be circumvented by nurture. You can't nurture your way out of some things, but sometimes you can nurture a directed manifestation of those things. And many things, like hate, greed, and malice, or love, generosity, and kindness are critical components of what makes a person who they are. Those things aren't natural. They're nurtured. As much as we may like to think that people are born good and sometimes corrupted, I think most often people are probably born relatively neutral and are shaped by their environment.