Tell me about your (fictional!) parents

Nadir & Nasreen's parents are Laylah and Ashraf Arazi. Nadir, my MC and 26 at the time of the story, has a very loving and respectful relationship with his parents, but it is a very loud household.
Nadir's dad, Ashraf, used to be a notary and very well-respected. He's proud of his son with his nursing degree, but will proceed to beating the shit out of him if we dare bring shame upon the family.
Laylah, his mother, is a lot more liberal and will also throw shoes, her rolling pin, and other items at Nadir or beat him with them. She will even do so at the dinner table.
Laylah is a stay-at-home-mom of 2 young adult kids, proud of her cooking and happy to do chores by herself so that nothing can go wrong. Since the erection of the ghetto, she complains about all kinds of pains and aches, but Nadir knows she's overplaying it in order to convince herself and others that joint aches are as bad as it gets around here. She also tends to forget that her children are grown and don't need her help with getting dressed and making breakfast anymore. The kids won't address this though.
Both are still stuck in their kids' childhood innocence and easily shocked and disappointed, and that's why Nadir starts to alienate them.

My WIP is very parent-ful. The book revolves around the MC, Elisa, and her mother who left when she was a baby and then comes back to make everything right, and they have to navigate a pretty intense relationship with some slight magical elements. As much as Elisa tries to get her dad to leave her alone, he sticks with her throughout the book, and there's a lot of negotiation as far as what she's allowed to do and what she can get away with. It's very frustrating for her, which feels pretty accurate in terms of what my teen years were like (not the magical mother part, of course).

Writing the mother is honestly a bit emotionally draining for me because she's pretty tragic and I have kids too and when I put myself in her perspective it really bums me out. The dad is a really stand-up guy with a huge heart and I feel bad for him too, but not quite the same. He drinks a lot of beer to cope with what's going on, but I wouldn't call him an alcoholic.

In Chapter 3 my main character wakes up and everyone else in her house is dead including both the three guys who were trying to kidnap her (the end of Character 2) and her parents. Since she has super powers she is suspected of their murder. The first half of the book is dedicated to figuring out what on earth happened.

My other younger characters are either orphans or their parents gave them up to a government agency because it was too difficult to raise a four year old with teleportation. I think I've got like, one set of parents wandering around.

I'm starting to worry about the patterns in the parents I write I don't want to be one of those authors whose books are all fundamentally the same. There's always conflict between the MC and her mom, and if there's a father/father figure, the MC always gets along with him better. I don't want it to become a "thing"!

I'm going to try really hard in my next WIP to make the mother less of an antagonist.

My book starts with serious conflicts between the MC and her mom. But they move to resolve them. At the start mom's ringtone is "Oh No It's Your Mom." Toward the end it's Spice Girl's Mama. The process is kind of a side plot.

I've finally written a book that has parents!

Mathis and Trails! They lived in the big city, but left after a knife-fight left Trails without a nose. Because my books take place in a universe where...magic exists, Mathis - the man of the pair - brought the child to term, while Trials protected him on the trail to their new town.

They were annoyingly genre savvy. The main character's birth was unusual and portentous and likely meant she was destined to save the world, so they told her as soon as possible that that was pretty likely.

And they kept a sack with adventuring gear in it for when their daughter would need to leave, so that she'd get going with two healing potions and a town portal scroll. None of this unable to get equipped because the barn got torched by evil soldiers for her!

Kit's mum is dead - his father is in prison for her murder. His gran is looking after him but she's an alcoholic and grieving; they both are. The story starts when his gran gives him to the man she had a one night stand with forty years earlier (his grandfather).

In my first book, Sharon is the daughter of a rather youngish veteran of World War III. He was a field medic who had his legs taken off at the knee by an IED, which sent him home. Since he can't work and the economy is all messed up, Sharon's mom has to be the bread winner while Sharon's dad stays home with her and two younger brothers. Sharon's mom works at a lumber yard, specifically helping to fell trees and retrieve them.

Both parents are inspired by people in my life. Sharon's dad is inspired by my late grandfather, a field medic and veteran of Korea and Vietnam. Sharon's mom is based off of my own. She really cares about her family, but she's constantly having to work long hours, which leaves her exhausted and sometimes dismissive.

My second book, an urban fantasy, has Ethan's parents, who were totally caring and possessed some of the most powerful magic in the world, die in a house fire, which launches Ethan into his quest to find out how that could happen when all they had to do was use their magic to either escape or put out the fire. His adoptive father is a single parent after his wife died shortly after the two adopted Ethan. He's just a standard, cool guy who likes to joke, especially when he's demonstrating that he's both mother and father to Ethan, but knows when to be serious. These parents aren't really based on anyone really, but I got the idea for Ethan's biological parents from a meme that I can't really give out, as it would spoil not only this book, but much of the series I have planned. Ethan's adoptive father is sort of the same way, with me drawing at least a tiny amount of influence from some of the funnier "troll dad" memes