Nature and Nurture

Sometimes, intuition preempts news.  Your common sense, your prior experience, your instinct tells you that something is true even before some study or organization or poll confirms it.  Sometimes, you just know.

This morning, when M told me about a Johns Hopkins study that confirms a definitive correlation between mothers' mental health and children's short stature, I said within a heartbeat, "of course."

Here's the study

Of course, because S is short.  Of course, because I've always been depressed.  Of course, because, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to blame some one for something, that person will be Mom.  Thanks, Freud.

Of course.  Is there anything that isn't Mom's fault?

I have a laundry list of things that are my mom's fault, starting with a compulsive need to make laundry lists,  all the way to my gnarled, double jointed Gollum fingers.  Everything is my mother's fault: my unhealthy eating habits, my weight gain patterns, my weird skin, my horrible joints, my tendency to pile crap up in corners, my obsession with tidy manicures, my temper.  All of these things, my mother is responsible for.  Either genetically or environmentally, my mom completely messed me up.

On the flip side, she would probably argue that every good quality I can think of I attribute to my father, whether he deserves it or not:  my sense of humor, my keen insight into human behaviour, my uncanny ability to spontaneously sleep.

In fact, there is a longstanding family joke that my sister is a clone of my dad.  She is so adamant of her own perfection, that clearly she inherited nothing from her mother.  Phew--mom dodged a bullet there.  If there were anything wrong with my sister (in her own eyes), it would most certainly be my mother's fault.

Here at our house, of course, the pattern repeats.  My kids' temper, their messiness, their premature acne, are by the kids' accounts, all my fault.  They are a product of my personality glitches.  We can now add S's shortness to the list.

Recently, in a conversation when I suggested that perhaps some of these shortcomings might be contributed by their father, E replied immediately and (to his credit) completely straight faced:  "No.  Dad is the Immortal God of Perfection."

Holy crap.  That's some serious stuff.  I mean let's examine that:  "Immortal--"  bad news, daddy-O.  You're not going to be able to age or croak.  Good luck living up to that expectation.  "God--" notice he is 'the' Immortal God.  Not an Immortal God.  Even more pressure.  Sheesh.  God, since we live in the same house, we should talk about some of the stuff you need to get done.  Can you work on global hunger, war, and, also, my Gollum fingers while he's at it. Also, I may need to rethink my atheism.  "Perfection--"  Well, that's not much room for error, is there?

So, wow.  Kudos to me for marrying a deity.

I hope the kids don't figure out down the road that traits like baldness are hereditary or imperfections.  That could set up an irreconcilable paradox.

In the end, though, I'm not sure I could handle the weight of the Immortal God of Perfection (IGOP) expectation.  I would not be good at immortality or perfection or deity-ness.   I'd be set up for inevitable failure.  I can't live with inevitable failure.  At this point, I may be the cause of a million shortcomings in my children, but occasionally, they recognize a positive contribution I've made to their lives.  I'd rather get the occasional surprise with a good quality, than disappoint them when they see my flaws.

Even S, despite his mom-caused shortness,  jumped to my defense after E declared Dad the IGOP:  "Mom is the God of Awesomeness.  She packs our lunches."

The road to holiness starts with small miracles.