After seeing Three Identical Strangers, I thought a lot about nature versus nurture. How much of our lives are controlled by genetics and how much of our lives are controlled by our environment? In the film, two of the brothers recognized their parents’ influence on their lives and how it saw them through difficult times.
It made me think of my own upbringing and I realized that, with my mother, both nature and nurture explain who I am.
Anxiety runs on my mother’s side of the family. Hypochondria, agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, her side of the family has it all. That’s where I get it from.
I also learned from my mother that the way to react to any stimulus is full blown panic.
We took a trip to L.A. when I was in the fifth grade and we took a bus tour of famous Los Angeles sites. During a stop, I didn’t know where my camera was. My mother and I flipped out. “Where’s your camera?!” “I don’t know!” We jumped out of our seats and looked around like soldiers looking for a live grenade in a tank. It turned up (probably between the seat cushions or something like that) and we both took an exaggerated sigh of relief while the rest of the bus looked at us, stunned.
The next day, we took another tour to go to the J. Paul Getty Museum. It was the same bus driver and tour guide. The tour guide looked at us and said, “Hey, Rob, where’s your camera?”
Irrational panic has been both taught to me and provided to me via genetic material.
It was another story, however, that occurred to me on the subway home from the movie, the one that made me think, yeah, this illustrates who I am and who my mother and I were as a unit.
It was middle school. My friend Jon and I were hanging out at my house, probably watching TV, whatever. We decided we wanted a snack. There were some microwavable mozzarella sticks in the freezer. Jon gets them out, puts them on a plate, tosses them in the microwave like a normal human being.
But here’s the thing. The directions on the box said to arrange the mozzarella sticks on the plate, “in a spokelike fashion.” We can’t just put them in the microwave and heat them! They have to be arranged in a spokelike fashion! If they aren’t arranged in a spokelike fashion, they might not cook correctly!
That was my inner monologue but I believe that my literal, outer monologue was basically the same. Jon looked at me like I was crazy.
My mother heard me going off about arranging things in a spokelike fashion and came to investigate.
“The package says to arrange them in a spokelike fashion!”
“Well, why aren’t you doing that?” she asked.
“Jon says it doesn’t matter!”
Let’s pause here for a second and just recognize that this exchange, or something very much like it, actually happened. To this day, if I look over at Jon and say the word “spokelike” he will either laugh, roll his eyes, or both. Retelling it to other people makes me feel shame and usually elicits from the listener a sort of curious, head cocked stare that seems to say, “I thought you were normal.”
I believe I eventually got my way and for reasons that I will never know, Jon continued being my friend.
This story is ridiculous, incredibly low stakes, and somehow totally typical of my upbringing. Sometimes I get visions of my father quietly reading in the living room while soft music plays and I wonder was that his own disposition or was that his coping mechanism?
My mother gets the brunt of my residual parent anger a lot of the time but all of our arguing wasn’t because we were two people who just couldn’t get along, it was because we were two people cut from the same cloth.
