As I enjoyed Colleen's column this morning it brought me to the thought of my own genes. My maternal grandmother, Grandma Z, was a competent, steady as you go, take no foolishness kind of woman. And yet she was fun too. My father was adopted so there we have a "Nature or Nurture" situation. Grandma Brock, loved us openly and dearly until we were about 10 and then she was sure we were headed for hell. 😉 She may have been right. Both of my grandmas are remembered fondly, both of them had a harder life than I have had and both of them lost their mate too early in life.
As I have become closer to my Deja Vu friends I have come to realize I had much more freedom in my growing-up years than many of them were afforded. My mother was a young widow(31) and had a fair amount of trouble dealing with many of the issues that came her way. Add 4 children to that mix and you see what I mean. One of my cousin's assessments of my mother, her aunt, was that she was always willing to listen, no matter day or night and for hours on end. I have to agree. Her 3rd husband said he didn't know a person could sit in one place for 8 hours straight and talk. I had to laugh when he said it because I knew he was right! The housework could always wait. A good friend of hers, Joann Ott, told me that there may be dust under the bed but my mother could put a meal on the table with nothing apparently available. I am sure she learned that from her own mother. I don't like to but I seem to be able to do that too.
Enjoy Colleen's column and take your own walk down memory lane with your genes.
Admission of crabby genes
September 29, 2021
~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I found a photo of my paternal grandparents as a young couple lounging on the grass with friends at a Fourth of July picnic, as it said on the back, no date. One of the young men wears a WWI uniform, the women wear snug, white, long-sleeved shirtwaists and calf-length black skirts. I figure the photo must have been taken between 1917 and 1920.
It opens a world of speculation about my grandparents. Grandpa lounges on one elbow in front of the group of four couples, a long, lean fellow with broad shoulders, a black cheroot hanging in his mouth, a cocky grin on his Irish face. I never knew him like this – a handsome, rakish fellow loving life. I knew him as a gentle, humorous fellow who smoked cigars, watched the fights on TV and let me crawl all over him taking his temperature, bandaging his fingers, giving him sugar pills from my doctor’s kit.
In this photo, he is irresistible, carefree and full to the brim with youth. I first became aware of him when I was a little girl of about 3; he was around 60 years old, had lost a child and a farm.
My grandma in the picture has her mouth open. I laughed because I remember her this way, talking, always telling someone what to do, berating Grandpa for dropping ashes on this shirt. She was a poet and a pistol as I grew up around her, Gramma having honed her crabby skills over the decades from when this picture was snapped. She too had lost a child and a farm.
She didn’t wear Grampa down, as I thought growing up; life got to both of them, and their reactions were characteristic of who they were.
Something about Grandma’s visage at the picnic so long ago nagged at me. “I think I look like her,” I said to myself, hoping I was wrong. But the longer I looked the more I believed I was the spitting image. I searched through a scrapbook until I came across the picture I was looking for that confirmed it. I’m 8 or 10 years old, standing before the camera holding the first and only fish I’ve ever caught in my life. My mouth is open, a slight frown creases my brow – I’m a miniature Grandma O’Brien.
Disconcerting, to say the least, to see these related females years apart yet connected by the particular genes that determine facial structure and expression. I hope I don’t have her temperamental genes because she was something of a crab. In the photo she was a young housewife, and she looks like she’s telling the photographer how to do his job.
I believe that one’s heritage has more to do with behavior than one’s environment. It is obvious that we have the build or hair color or upturned nose of our progenitors, so it must be that their innate personalities – the kindness or the meanness, the generosity or the stinginess – lurks somewhere in our souls.
As my children grew up, I felt increasingly that they were who they were when they came out of the womb. My training of them, or my brainwashing, was a surface ritual that is a veneer on their very individual selves. Of course, my rearing of them is also a family pattern with leftovers of my parents’ training, and of their parents.’ It is, therefore, a very intertwined process of genes and environment. These phantoms of past generations that appear in oneself and then in one’s child are as eerie as they are predictable.
Sometimes I see in myself what I call quirks that are the negatives of my mom or my dad, of my grandmas and grandpas. As I recognize them I quit doing them, but they come again. They are part of me. As I pile up mounds of letters, papers, poems and junk mail in my office, I am my Grandma O’Brien who was a collector and a saver. She was a rotten housekeeper, reading newspapers and letting them fall at her feet; cooking and baking and never cleaning up the kitchen; arranging cut flowers in vases all over the house and leaving them to wilt and rot.
When I see that I have done the same things, I am suddenly my mom, cleaning with a vengeance, making immaculate house out of chaos. This is the reaction to my other genes, my other grandmother who trained my mom. She was neat, clean and orderly, never crabby, very fun to be with.
With two such diverse gene pools, my life has been one minute one thing and one minute the other. At least it’s not dull.
I wish I’d known the two young people at the picnic 10 decades ago. But then, I do, don’t I? I am their blood and brains, and I act and react in ways they would recognize. I know I have a bit of the devil-may-care of Grampa’s youth, as well as the kindness and gentleness of his maturity. I might as well admit I have a tad of Grandma O’Brien’s shrewishness, shrewdness and sloppiness. What the hell, if you can’t admit the crabby genes, you can’t lay claim to the good ones. And had those two far-off souls at a picnic never laid side by side, I wouldn’t be here now with all their (my) faults and attributes.
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