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Nature or Nurture?

Nurture (=environment)

When my father came home tired from work in the early 1970s, a bottle of white wine was first uncorked. 'You don't hear that in church', he would always say. My parents then sat comfortably at the kitchen table to finish the bottle of wine while going over their day and my father smoked a number of cigarettes. At least 7 bottles of wine went through each week plus a bottle of cognac or jenever. The jenever or cognac was usually drunk at the weekend, in addition to the daily bottle of wine, because my father thought he had earned something after a week of hard work. Finally, at the age of 57, he was presented with the bill consisting of high blood pressure and later three heart attacks, the last of which was fatal. My mother suffered from high blood pressure from the age of sixty and was diagnosed with breast cancer twice in her life, from which she eventually died.

I grew up in a time and environment where alcohol was on the daily agenda for many people and served as a reward, especially on Fridays, if you had studied or worked hard all week. During our studies, my husband and I knew what to do with it. On Friday evening quite a bit was thrown in (and smoked) and then woke up Saturday afternoon with a roaring pain in your head and nausea. Gosh, did you think when you mustered up the courage to get up and look at the smelly, overflowing ashtrays, nothing more for a while! When I worked as a starting teacher at the domestic science school in the early eighties, people even drank a glass of sherry during the lunch break on Fridays so that you were more or less tipsy and jolly in front of the class in the afternoon. The party was resumed at four o'clock in the afternoon by a weekly Friday afternoon drink. At that time, a number of teachers also did the 'sherry cure', a 'diet' to lose the necessary pounds. 'Gosh', they said, 'How ideal, you don't even have to skip the Friday afternoon drink.'

Or Nature? (= hereditary predisposition)

I was 44 years old when I got breast cancer myself and asked the oncologist: 'How is that possible, I'm much too young for that?' The doctor pointed with his thumb behind him to a poster where the air pollution of the Randstad was mapped. He said that was the cause of my breast cancer so I couldn't do much about it myself, were my thoughts. After my sixtieth birthday I had to deal with cancer and high blood pressure again. Well, at first you nod vigorously 'yes' when doctors ask you whether cancer/high blood pressure runs in the family. Yes, it runs in the family so what can i do about that? In short: It's easier for yourself to think it's a matter of heredity (there's not much you can do about that), than it is to change your drinking behavior. People including myself are super good at sticking their heads in the sand.

I thank god on my knees that I have been lucky enough to be cured of cancer twice and have held up a big mirror to myself afterwards. Drinking alcohol and many other bad habits weaken your health so that malignant (cancer) cells or diseases have an earlier chance to rear their head. For me it really had to turn around! Nature or nurture? What does it matter? Sufficient evidence has been published that unhealthy lifestyle habits including drinking alcohol can damage health. Hence my 40 days no drop challenge, which are actually 100, but more about that in my next blog.

This is Tony

I am 66 years old and grew up in South Rotterdam as the youngest in a family of four children. My father was a bricklayer and my mother was a housewife. At the end of my high school period, I met my husband (1976) and as a young couple, quite unusual for that time, we lived together on a floor in Oud Spangen. We mainly lived here during our studies. He as a law/history student and me as a student at the teacher training college in Delft. In addition to a scholarship, we generated income by working through an employment agency during the holiday periods.

As a starting teacher I started in the eighties at a domestic science school in the Afrikaanderbuurt (Rotterdam). We then moved to a coastal town in South Holland where we got married and had two sons. In combination with taking care of the family and my job as a teacher, I studied psychology at the Open University in the evenings. In the meantime, I explored the boundaries of teaching by becoming a teacher at a school for students with learning and behavioral problems. I combined my knowledge of psychology with my practical experience as a teacher and then ran a testing and consultancy agency for a number of years. Based on intelligence and personality tests, I provided secondary schools with advice regarding students who had difficulty learning at school.

Officially I am now retired, but I believe that you should develop all your possible qualities in life and I have focused on being a writer in recent years. I have written a women's novel (in which hangovers in the main character are described!) which to my surprise was found by a publisher to be worth publishing (2022) and as icing on the cake, later approved by the Biblion. I am currently writing a sequel to the book.