Our family is a Brady Bunch (without the bad seventies hair or live-in help).
Before 1996, I was raising my daughter and he was raising his daughter. They have now spent about 40 percent of their lives as our daughters together. That's eight years of identical family dinners, travel, shared relatives, triumphs and tragedies. So careful are we that neither feels the other is favored, their cars are identical except for color.
Both spent their grade school years in Houston and their high school years at the same school in Georgia. But while they share the same parents and pets, their priorities and interests can not be more different.
I can believe it's nature when I am caught unaware by a quirk or idioscycrasy in our older daughter that seemingly can only be tied to the chromosones she and I share.
But when I see our younger daughter follow her father exactly in independent response to the same situation, I can't look to an x or y string. She was adopted overseas as an infant.
Regardless of how long we've all been together, each original parent/child set will always have their own communications shorthand.
Our older daughter is an improved model of me at her age with the same temperment, ambitions, passions, and interests. She struggled a bit at the start of her college career until she decided to transfer to my alma mater... and my major. She quickly made both her own. You could see her as the poster child for the nature argument.
Our younger daughter looks nothing like her father, but absolutely mirrors his considered response to everything. Little Miss Nurture.
Charlie and Jen are cautious and deliberate while Jess and I start from instinct and impulse. They are slow to anger and slow to release the anger. We flash and forgive quickly.
Both girls see traits they would like to emulate in their newer parent and perhaps those will come in time and maturity.
Or maybe they will always be the people they were meant to be regardless of our influence.
Parents can put up bumpers and guideposts, but we can't chart our children's courses.
Each of our girls is a splendid individual. It's a wonderful conceit to claim credit for the adults they are becoming, but it's a lie. We've covered the basics and will always love them, but their choices and consequences now belong only to each of them.
Whatever the combination of nature and nuture that brought them to this place, the best part of the journey is theirs.