Nature or Nurture?

Simon was a man who wondered too much. There was usually something buzzing through his mind that didn’t really matter to anyone but himself, be it the name of the tune that someone was humming on the bus or what those little plastic tips on shoelaces were called (aglets, he had recently discovered). Usually these ponderings disappeared after a few hours, occasionally popping back, but never really bothering him.

There was, however, one thing that persistently bothered him.

Who was his father?

Now, it’s only fair at this point to explain that he knew who his dad was. He was the man that he and his older brother Rob saw every weekend when he was a boy, the man that took him for McDonald’s and let him have a bit of his cider. That was his dad, a happy man who had all the time in the world for Simon, and had never even raised his hand to him, let alone beaten him. His dad was a good man, but was he Simon’s father?

Simon’s parents divorced when he was 5, and his mum had remarried a few years later. Soon after came Simon’s little brother, Jake. From that point onwards, things were very normal. Simon saw his step dad as another dad, and often lamented the fact that Jake seemed to get preferential treatment. It wasn’t surprising though, he supposed, because Jake was the biological son, and golden boy, but it still irked him a little.

A couple of years ago, while his step dad was away on business for a few weeks, Simon had a night in with his mum and a DVD. They had a couple of bottles of wine and ended up chatting until the small hours about this, that and the other. It was on this night that he discovered the reason his mum had left his dad. It was fairly obvious he supposed, but it turns out that she had had an affair with his soon-to-be step dad. He was a little shocked, but it was over 20 years ago, and one can’t be too upset about these things. 

What did bother him though, was his similarity to his younger half brother. Not so much now, as they’d grown to look individual from each other, but when they were small. The pictures of them were very similar indeed. Simon bore very little resemblance to Rob, and had a completely different temperament- however, he was as fiery as Jake. When he put two and two together and considered more of the details that his mum had told him, Simon worked out that the affair would have been going on before he was conceived. 

The thing is, he was just like his dad. He was overweight and loud, he was outgoing and everyone’s friend. So he bore more resemblance to his dad than his step dad. This alone should have been enough to dispel his fears, but he was a born ponderer. Was it nurture over nature?

Well, whatever the answer, he would never ask the question. What difference would it make?