This is just a personal musing. I’ve spent the morning – a very hot sweltering morning – avoiding the sun, and instead, trolling through the U.K. adoption forums. Over the coming U.K. summer holidays, my family is scheduled to adopt a new child. Touch wood, because these things have a tendency to fall through for numerous reasons. But adoption brings up a story in my own mind, a story which reminds me of the great debate towards nature and nurture.
Being an adopted child myself, I have to say – I’ve never had anyone I’ve “looked like” or been compared to. My looks, and in many cases, hobbies and talents, come completely from within myself. I’ve had to build up my own identity myself, having no real person to look at and suggest I’ve inherited that trait from so-and-so. For me, knowing what I was interested in, and good at, came from a lot of trial and error. There were influences, of course, from my adoptive parent, but those were environmental influences based on what was affordable, what was available, and what my mother would allow into her own life.
You hear it all the time around you from other parents – “Oh yes, my darling daughter is good at drawing because her father is an artist too”, or, “Matthew is a fantastic football player – his grandfather played for England you know, yes – on that team that beat Germany that year...”
Occasionally you hear some puzzlement, “Yes, Jasmine is good at mathematics, I can’t work out why. The whole family is rubbish at it.” But eventually, to suit the need, most talents or gifts are traced back to some famous or obscure ancestor, even if Jasmine’s was an infamous gambler who grifted an amount of money out of some royal, and ended up hung for his numeracy prowess.
For many years now, I’ve been a crafter or hobbyist. I’m reasonably talented at it, even won some competitions, and wrote for magazines for my craft passions at the time. People, since my own early childhood, have always classified me as ‘the artistic one’ in any group of random people. I’m the person who has inherited signage boards to mark up, flipcharts to decorate, crafting projects which are bigger than a simple paintbrush or junk modelling.
So it came as no surprise to anybody, including to myself (other than the wonder of finally having somebody who not only looks like me, but acts like me also) when my birth daughter started showing some early signs of possessing a reasonable artistic and creative talent. Recognised by teachers and friends alike, my daughter is now one of the “artists” at school.
And at every school parent-teacher conference, when this artistic talent is commented on by her teacher, my hubbie immediately jumps in with the expected, “Oh, it’s not me. I can’t draw to save my life. It’s her…” and he turns to me.
So, applause please. I have somehow begat an ‘artist’, all from a little genetic mix, some blood and other bodily fluids we won’t go into here.
What surprised me, and made me muse a little, was what happened more recently. Over the last few years my crafting hobbies have slowly been waylaid by my own need to be a writer. The urge, the need, was always there deep in me, and I’ve written of this previously. I always considered myself, looking into a distant old age, as being a writer, not an artist of any sort. Writing was what I thought was really in my blood.
Apparently so. Whilst my daughter was happily busying herself with junk modelling, colouring-in, painting and making, I thought this completely fine and dandy. At school, she’s a fine student, top of her class at everything she learns, able to read well in advance of the class or age bell-curve.
Just like her mother, again, then.
But regarding writing, I’d never really been able to coach her into considering it. She just didn’t seem interested. For her, it was more about drawing, painting, playing, living, asking far too many questions all the time. Just like many other six year olds. So I never asked her to write something again.
Six months later she surprised me. We have a spare half hour before leaving for school most mornings, and my daughter will often disappear off – to play with the dog, create something, read a book, whatever…Meanwhile, I catch up with the day’s emails and get rid of must-do tasks, enjoying the quiet time before school.
She turned up, then, that morning not long ago, at my desk. She’d created from scratch a book, taped together with at least twenty leaves of paper inside. And she’d filled it with a completely original story involving a caterpillar, a doctor, and a wedding. She’d illustrated all the pages (being the artist, of course she would) with detailed images of each scene, and written the entire story out from beginning to end.
Looking at it, it’s a story which is humourous, has a punch line I didn’t see coming, and is completely and utterly publishable as a children’s book in the format she’s created it (give or take some missing fullstops and capitals at the start of her sentences, which her teacher hadn’t yet taught her about).
It’s a story I could never have written myself, it’s incredibly talented, and even impressed her teacher so much, it’s been held up as a model for two or three other classes. On looking at it, I’ve had my husband, and possibly the teacher look at me with some scepticism thinking perhaps I had a lot of hidden hands in it. But I didn’t. I hadn’t even known it was being created at the time. The writing talent of my daughter was as much a surprise to me as it was to her father when he got home that night to be shown it.
Which leads me to my next and final question. Although as a proud parent, I consider my daughter to be a talented and gifted writer, I realise this does not necessarily make me one. And as with all of us, we must always work at improving whatever talent in writing we do possess. It’s not something guaranteed. It’s work.
Is ‘Being a Writer’ a talent that can be inherited genetically, then? If she’d have been, for whatever reason, adopted out to another parent, would my daughter have shown such a talent so quickly like that? How much is nurture, and how much is nature in writing? And what happened to the talent for sports which she should have inherited from her father?
Photo Credit : Image by f0xypar4 on Flickr [creative commons]
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Tue, Jun 30, 2009
Personal Writing Journey