SO, MOTHER'S DAY GOT ME TO THINKING...

That's always dangerous, I can hear you thinking. True. Because then I begin to wonder. And what I wonder this time is: What constitutes a mother (or father)? Is it the blood relationship they share with their children? Or the history they fashion over time raising them? I remember debating nurture vs nature in a long ago journalism class. At the time I didn't have a strong conviction either way.

But given the direction my own family has taken, I'm pretty firmly on the "nurture" side these days. Several members of my family are adopted. So I believe it's the day-to-day nurturing and the history you share that forges the tightest connections. Because except for the way in which various nieces, nephews, cousins, etc, came to us, there's no difference from those born of our bodies. They aren't thought of as the adopted neice, nephew, etc, etc. They're simply Jenny, Scott, Sam, Adam, Elliott, Grace and Noah. Each has contributed to the memories that make up our holidays and other important events: the births, the deaths, the weddings, the family reunions and birthday parties and other celebrations that weave the fabric of our family history.

I've been lucky to have a close relationship with my own mother. When I was growing up, she was a definite role model and her example gave me the base to build my own parenting skills. These days her dementia is worsening and our roles have been reversed. But the one thing the disease hasn't robbed her of is her sense of humor, so I have no doubt she'd tell me that if I really want to honor her I should quit killing off the mothers in my books.

Sorry, Mom, that's not gonna happen. Hey, I don't really kill them kill them. And it's actually a compliment to you that I rarely give my hero and heroine functional parents. Yeah, yeah, it's a backhanded one. Still, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. The stability you and dad provided grounded me. So doesn't it just reason, then, that screwed up parents provide all sorts of motivation for fictional conflict?

Or maybe it's just that I prefer stories where a dysfunctional mother or father has screwed up our protagonist's way of looking at relationships. Take Sebastian, Lord Dain in Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels. His father was a puritanical prude who told eight year old Sebastian his mother was an evil, godless creature, whose name was Jezebel, when she ran away from their bloodless marriage, then assured the boy she was going to Hell where she would be eaten by dogs. Then, disregarding that this was a little kid who'd just lost his mother, he shipped Sebastian off to Eton, where he promptly had every iota of sensitivity beaten out of him.

So begins a fabulous, well motivated book. So give me a stable family in real life. But I gotta love the dysfunctional in fiction.

How 'bout you? What's your poison when it comes to your hero and heroine's backgrounds? Do you have a fave dysfunctional bad boy/girl who is tamed in the end?

Inquiring minds wanna know.