"Smeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelllllllllllllll that salt air, girls! Fill your lungs!" yells my father as we're driving up from the coast, back to Melbourne after a weekend on the beach. "Nothing but cars and city air all week! You need it for your lungs!".
We dutifully wind down the windows, take big gulps. He's right - it smells like salt and the pine trees that line the Torquay Road leaving this small coastal town. Whilst the week might be tainted by his stress from working, the weekends are salt encrusted, sandy footed loveliness. We eat salad rolls from the corner shop and sesame bars, fish and chips if we're lucky. I carry my father's board down to the sea and he pushes me into waves screaming: 'paddle paddle paddle!!' and off I fly, surrounded by salt spray and blue skies. He spends hours out on the waves whilst we burrow into the tea tree forests at Bells Beach and make little cubby houses and beds out of moss.
Image Source The rusty windmill at Bells Beach disappeared years ago, but I remember playing around it as a kid, waiting for Dad to come in from a surf
Dad comes home some mornings after the 3 am drive down to catch the dawn surf and be back for work and I hear him waxing lyrical to Mum. 'Shoulda seen it, Chris,' he says as she smiles wryly at him, amused as his enthusiasm. 'The light was catching the water and it was this amazing blue, and there was a school of dolphins going past - beautiful, just beautiful'. He is infectious in his enthusiasm for nature and the things that pique his interest; surly and grumpy at other times. I'm raised wary of people's moods - I'm an open child and full of loving from the outset, so I'm puzzled and wounded when he doesn't have time for me, and ecstatic when he does. It's just adult life, I realise years later, not any personality flaw on his part - I'm just the kind of kid that watches every move just in case it's me that's responsible. Of course it never is - the day his first born daughter arrived in the world was the best day of his life, he tells his grandson for a school project question years later. My sister will get mildly indignant at this, but that's not how he means it.
I'm raised with firm parenting that brooks no argument. The toys must be put away, the boots must be lined up by the front door not thrown carelessly. The brick patio needs sweeping daily of leaves and the phonebook must be put away immediately upon using it. Living with two Virgos for parents means a clean and tidy house and you don't want to mess with that. They give us a lot of attention - we go camping trips and do fun things as a family, but we also must abide by the rules 'under their roof'. I'm okay with this growing up because I'm loved and it seems a small price to pay for that. Of course I resist - I sneak out of my bedroom in the middle of the night, see boys too old for me, take things I shouldn't and get into trouble. There's things I get busted for and for which I feel ashamed about but they won't even remember them years later. 'Oh that,' they'll say - 'do you still remember that?'.
I'll raise my own son similarly - be strict about healthy eating and learning to contribute to the house. I dote on him but I don't spoil him and I mother exactly as my Mum mothered me, maybe with just a little touch of my own special craziness that was individually me, and shaped too because I liked to rebel against the rules that restrained me as a kid. I used to think it was because it was my folks were strict, but in retrospect, they were always so liberal minded that this became who I was too. If I was going to be a single mum, I wasn't going to follow convention - I'd travel Europe with a 4 year old in tow despite what people might say about that (and they did - I lived in a small town) and do nothing by the book of life and always felt supported by my family. Always.
I think of nurture versus nature and wonder how much genetics has to do with it. My Nana is a strong German woman who migrates with three boys in tow post world war two, with an alcoholic husband and a life to build. She too brooks no nonsense, is resourceful and independent. But then so is my mother and there's different genes there. Both woman are fierce in their strength. My grandmother insists I don't need a man for happiness whilst I'm sad about a broken relationship, my mother rants about men and double standards and their sense of superiority and whilst would never call herself a feminist, sprinkles liberal helpings of girl power into the mix so that I'll surf and run and skate and horseride and skateboard and do all the boy things with gusto, and years later will be fiercely feminist and share the same indignant rage as my mother. It will stop me staying for too long with men that can't match my intelligence and can't be with me as an equal. Intolerance can be a useful thing.
I'll have a child at 25, out of wedlock of course to a man I don't stay with despite him being in love with me - he can't keep up with me, is the problem, and he bores me. He's lovely, but I need quick wit and energy, adaptability and a bit of crazy thrown in like chilli powder. Having a kid changes plans somewhat, but not entirely - he comes along for the ride, and his calm, grounded and steady nature keeps me on keel, more so that if I had never had him.
Jarrah washing dishes by a loch, Applecross, Scotland
For a long time I rejected that I was anything like my mother, but now, I realise I am the product of both of them - Dad's joyful naivete, blind enthusiasm and desire to 'just keep moving' and Mum's resourceful practical intelligence. I have my father's passion for music and my mother's love of dystopian fiction. I have Dad's propensity for overly judging people and my mother's refusal to judge anyone. I have Dad's tendency to gather people up in crazy projects and adventures, and my Mum's tendency to calm things down with a good cup of tea and a clean house and a well made meal. I have both of their love of literature, and an appreciation of art, architecture and gardens.
My Nana's green thumb therefore doesn't entirely skip a generation - her house in Yarraville is full of vegetables, bananas trees and a giant monstera deliciousa, huge fruit trees (including a giant apricot decorated with plastic bags to scare the birds) and a greenhouse full of all kinds of plants. My parents garden is a mix of natives and a big vegetable garden and chickens. When I first met J. at the age of 30, within a day we knew we were going to get married because we shared a dream of having land to grow our own food. All those years between leaving home and then made no difference - having a garden and being self sufficient to a degree had clearly shaped where I wanted to be. 'Taste these broad beans!' Dad would shout zestily. 'Can't beat homegrown!'. And in my own glee as I bring in hauls of peas and beetroot, parsley and potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes, I hear the echoes of my father's voice. I will wonder whether my son will come around - raised gardening, he swears he will fill his garden with concrete and never turn another sod again. He won't though - he will rent a house with a giant apricot tree and tie plastic bags on it to scare away the birds.
What my parents put into practice with a belief in treating everyone equally I will have to put into action actually as I travel and end up with alternative folk and madmen, fringe dwellers and gypsies, people from all over the world. I wonder why I'm attracted to this side of humanity and can't bear a closeted life. Is it the planetary influence of Chiron, I'll wonder at some point, my chart read by a trustafarian who lived incongruously in a cardboard and plastic yurt on the edge of a trout-stream by her parents thousand hectare estate. Maybe feeling like a black sheep makes me a black sheep myself - all black sheep flock together more comfortably, after all. It'll be these black sheep that shape me too, allowing to me to see it's fine to be who I am as diversity and difference is what the cloth of the world is cut from.
Ours is the green horse lorry. I loved this wild and free life on the fringe of society - for a time.
My parents were conventional, but I suppose not that conventional that they didn't raise me with a curiosity and need for adventure and a healthy dose of openmindness. But then there was something in me that was attracted to darkness in a way that they weren't. I wanted to feel the world and the best way to do that was to step right into the whirlpool and feel it all intensely. Drugs and alchohol were a good way to hasten that journey - and then, as they say, once the doors of perception open, they can't be shut. So that will become a path, for a while, too, until I grow out of it, and am talked out of it by a husband who needs to leave it behind, because he would have gone even further than me down that dark rabbit hole and needs a partner to help him be steady on his feet as he moves into the next part of his life. And like my parents, who set a good example for marriage, I'll enter this marriage with gusto and know that it will last me the rest of my life, through thick and thin.
I'll need to go the windy path to get to who I am, and I have a best friend whose love of spirituality becomes a sounding board for my own pathway. I feel lucky that through this, and an early introduction to yoga, I am led to ways of thinking that teach me a little more about what this all means and allows me to rest with it all with a degree of equanimity.
Labrinths at Rocky Valley, near Tintagel, Cornwall, symbolic of a journey inwards to me - a journey in that will shape how I see the world
Raised with a love of the environment I'll be fiercely tied to landscape wherever I am, hunting out forests and lakes and rivers and oceans and mountains. It's there that I feel most free and at home, though I love the grittiness of city life too. Cities won't enthrall me for long though - I will shout at my son: 'wind down the windows! Breath in that fresh air!' and turn the music up loud. Three generations now with guitars on the walls - it's just me that won't get around to learning properly. I'll buy my father's guitar when we think he's dying, just to have a piece of him in the house, and will promise to start to learn.
There's a lot that happens between leaving home and the future. There will be dark times and crazy adventures, and situations I will put myself in that, in years to come, will seem rather strange. Yet I am still the same me I was all those years ago in my father's car, inhaling salt air.
This was written in response to the Tribe Steem Up Bi-Weekly Question - 'What Has Happened in My Life to Make Me Who I am Today?', a question proposed by 
. It's a hard one to answer, as so much can happen in our lives!
How have your lives been shaped?
Has it been one particular event, or a series of happenings?
How much are we shaped by nurture, and how much by nature?
Can we ever say 'this is who I am' with certainty, or are lives continuing to shape us, or are we learning to better shape our lives through increased connection with true self (now there's another steempost in the making!
With much love, fellow tribes xx
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