I saw a TV series not long ago called “The Most Identical Twins Test” which placed twins in situations that tested their alikeness and helped determine whether their personalities were programmed into their genes or were learned. The conclusion surprised even the reseachers: our personalities are mostly genetic.

It makes sense. With the exception of physical fitness, there is very little we can do to change the way we look. Our genes decided, and that is that. Why should our personalities be any different? Oh, we can change our behavior, no question about that. But our natural inclinations, talents, likes and dislikes, that is who we are born to be.

my maternal grandmother

I began to suspect that I was adopted fairly early in life, although I was not treated any differently from my half-sisters.(I realize most kids fantasize that they were adopted at some point.) I also accepted the explanation that my dark looks came from my maternal grandmother, whose dark hair and eyes come from Native American blood, Woodland Algonquin to be exact. My mother’s father is also descended from Choctaw. So it wasn’t a huge stretch to say I had inherited my looks from my Indian ancestors. 

My mom and her dad

No, it wasn’t so much the way I looked that bothered me as a child, although I often wished for blonde hair and blue eyes. It was the way I felt that disturbed me. I was an emotional kid, and I spent the greater part of my childhood just trying not to cry. My parents frequently found me sobbing in the middle of the night for absurd reasons: my frog that died years earlier, the Poseidon Adventure, poor Grampy (my great-grandfather) living all alone in the desert. I have no doubt that I got this quality from my mother, an avid crier who has been described as having “an overdeveloped sense of empathy.” But now when I also see my biological father sob shamelessly at sappy movies, I realize I got a double-whammy of the weepy gene. My siblings, on the other hand, escaped this fate.

It didn’t take long for my sisters to discover how easy it was to make me cry. It was a mystery to them and to myself why I didn’t fight back, why I would simply crumble when teased rather than stand up for myself. Instead I bottled my anger up inside until I would simply explode in a fit of violent rage, earning me the nicknames “Tasmanian Devil” and “Spiderwoman”, because, like one of them said, when I came at them it was ‘like I had eight arms’.

For the most part, our family was quiet and subdued, so much so that excitement somehow came to be frowned upon. On the way to Disneyland one day, for example, we took turns accusing one another, “You’re excited!” 

“No, I’m not!” the other would vehemently deny. Ridiculous, I know.

For a kid who secretly yearned to dance and sing, the unwritten “no excitement” rule was a source of frustration. Add to that the fact that my father’s religion, to which my mother did not subscribe, forbade even listening to the radio. My mom had a radio that we listened to when my dad wasn’t home. We would try to listen for his car. Then we’d scramble before he walked in.

“Dad’s home! Turn off the radio!”

(We were never quite clear on the rules of our dad’s religion. That pleasure was frowned upon was clear, but “no excitement”? Perhaps they were afraid it would lead to dancing.)

I badly wanted to take chorus and band classes in school, but I never voiced that desire. I felt there was something wrong with wanting to play music. Still, I remember being eight years old, swinging on the tree alone in our backyard and singing songs that I made up.

Fortunately, by the time I was in my teens my dad had left his religion and we were free to listen to music and to dance. I discovered music in high school and became obsessed. During my senior year I got a job at Music Plus and spent most of my checks on cds. On weekends I went dancing with my friends.

After my first year of college I got married and left home, and then the party really began! My husband and I had musical friends, and we would clear the cushions off the bench seat and use it for a stage. With a stick of deodorant for a microphone and a costume change for every song, I began to break the “no excitement” rule with gusto.

Free at last, my musical juices began to flow, and it was at that time that I wrote my first song. I can’t remember it now, but my dad Neil had just succumbed to cancer, and I know I wrote a pathetic dirge about his passing. The songs I write now are considerably more cheery.

I had struggled to free the music inside of me, but like a chrysalis whose wings are made stronger by fighting its way out of the cocoon, it gave me a stronger sense of identity. In a way, I am glad that I did not know that I came from musical stock. I discovered who I am all on my own. I could have been raised in a family of hot-blooded Creole musicians whose tears came easy and tempers exploded like a bomb with a long fuse, but would it have been as easy to identify myself? Would I have recognized that those things came from within and not without? Instead, growing up with contrast made it clear who I really am. In the nature vs. nurture debate, nature wins.

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