ARE YOU MY PARENT?

The title is inspired by Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? – book which is a memorable one to me
and also a significant one in form of a graphic novel speaking about the complexities in a mother
daughter relationship, her own story as she tried to understand her emotionally distant mother. I
won’t tell much about Bechdel’s work here but the book definitely opened up questions for me, that
of parenting, family, motherhood.

What defines a family? A place fore safety, nurturing, care or a place defined by relationship,
inheritance, lineage? We were all born into families, inherited relations, grew up to question many
of those, created newer relationship and may be families also. It was a given in most cases. But what
happens when we don’t inherit “families” by birth, but are welcomed into one. What and how does
a family by adoption grow up, nourish, nurture