Clan loyalty, genetics and fear of heights

Here's a very personal, family-related post with a light adoption focus (or dark humor adoption focus, depending on how you look at it).

My mother was over at my house last night; we had a fresh baked trout and watched Inside Man. She, my husband and I talked a little bit about how much I resemble my father. He'd asked her recently, "How did my genes so throughly defeat yours?" My mother and father are almost polar opposites personality-wise.

My mother is a social genius. She can ask anyone the most personal questions in such a charming and self-deprecating way that they end up telling her their life story in just a few minutes. She's way too independent to work in a social services or psychological setting, but her gifts have still helped her in running her own business, since she can instantly recall the faces, families, birthdays, pets and significant life events of any of her clients. My father happens to be a misanthrope and professional conversation-killer. When people asked him "How are you doing?" he used to like to reply with "I'm dying". Then when they offered their shocked condolences, he would say, "but aren't we all dying... every day?" He has no love of humanity, or even mammals for that matter, although he does seem to appreciate plant life and small invertebrates.

I'd like to resemble my mother more in social areas, but realistically, I only received about 25% of her social intelligence and extroverted nature. I think I'm fairly average... I enjoy meeting new people, but get tired very quickly of small talk and would rather stay home with my husband than go to most social situations. Another area where I'm in the middle is fear of heights. I hate peering over cliff ledges, but I've been out hiking in mountains a few times and mostly loved it. My father has no fear of heights whatsoever. My mother, past about ten feet up, gets faintness, dry sweats and electric tingling pain in her feet.

As my mother, my husband and I were talking last night, I noted that my father almost never talks about his adoptive parents. In fact, I know slightly more about his biological parents than I do about his adoptive. My mother countered with the fact that he has a very strong sense of loyalty to the place where he grew up and also to his clan. I remember his constant refrain when I was a child that he was the first person in his clan to go to college, and that meant as the next generation I was obligated to get a graduate degree so I could beat his own bachelor's degree. I have an MBA now, but he says it doesn't really count. I honestly have to agree with him -- as long anyone has solid studying discipline and the most basic grasp of pre-calculus math, business degrees are pretty easy to get. Nevermind, I'm sure I'll have another more interesting master's degree at some point within the next five years.

I'd known for a long while that my dad used to dangle me over the edges of balconies when I was a baby. My mother told me it was only one of a series of differences in childrearing philosophies that contributed to their eventual divorce. He argued that holding me over the edges of buildings would innoculate me against a future fear of heights. She very strongly disagreed. All I can say is that while I have a strong relationship with my father, I'm glad he was never close to being my primary parental caregiver.

When I heard about the Michael Jackson scandal (the one a few years ago where he dangled one of his kids over the hotel balcony) I felt a little bit embarassed. Hey! That was me!

My mother, in reminding me of my dad's feelings of clan loyalty, mentioned the underlying reason he wanted to cure me of a fear of heights by holding me over the edges of balconies: because the clan were roofers.

This is another piece of the puzzle coming together. Now if I only knew their names. A long time ago I asked him, for a grade school project, to do a family tree for me, adoptive and biological. It took a lot of nudging, and I think he refused to write anyone's names in English characters. The piece of paper was lost long ago. Maybe when he's staying with us for his recuperation period, I can get him to draw me another one.