About heritage

I am different from my parents and brothers (of which I have two) in many ways.
I *look like* a mixture of my parents, I have my mothers bonestructure and my dad's shape of the eyes and nose. I also have my grandmothers' haircolour. Golden blonde with a reddish streak that comes out with sunshine. 
But my personality is very unlike that of my parents. They are very calm persons, tranquil, my dad is even understated. They're people with normal aspirations, conventional jobs and simple desires for life. I don't mean that in any negative way, I just can't come up with other words for it. I feel like they are the "normal" ones; not me.

I have drawn, written and read for as long as I can remember.
I read before I started pre-school, and my parents only discovered that because I, one evening over dinner, picked up a box of matches and read out loud from the back of it. Nobody had taught me, but I remember poring over the big collection of lexica for hours, looking af the pictures. Nobody draws in my family, my parents are very fond of Bjorn Wiinblad, but that is about as artsy as it gets. I would get dirty creative with paper and pens, little scraps of leftover yarn, pearls, pieces of wood, cardboard and later clay and cloth from "ungdomsklubben", later yet again with photography and photoshop.  I also have a temper that earned me the nickname "mokke" already as a little child. If things didn't go the way I wanted them to, I would start screaming, turn blue from lack of air, and faint. Then I would wake up and scream some more.

I moved out from home early and a little later moved on to Aarhus and then Copenhagen to pursue the dancing-thing that had gotten my attention. I ended up in Italy but that's a longer story. The short story is that I always followed my whims (to much regret of my family) and did pretty much what I wanted to do, with little concern to the possible consequences. I have lived hard, worked hard and played hard. And I don't understand where this willfulness comes from. This streak to do things differently, this stubbornness, this reluctance to conform, my unconventional passions.
I like to think my creativity comes from my grand-grand-dad who painted a lot. And maybe I got my willfulness from my grandmother; she was a very strong woman although very subtle in her strength.

Now I recognise myself (and everybody recognise me) in my 3-year old niece. She is wilfull, stubborn and sweet, but a little devil that will throw a serious hissy-fit if things don't go her way. She will dance as soon as anybody puts on music and she actually sort of looks like me when I was a kid.

Is it possible for genes or for certain treats of personality to jump generations, or crossmix like that ?

Comments

kyllyan said…
@anna:
do you *know* or think that ?
K

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