(illustration, left, links to Ms. Modan's web site)

It's worth subscribing to New York Times Select just to be reminded that Rutan Modan is out there doing this great genre-breaking illustrated blog that, being about family, is always about conflict resolution.

Today, in Queen of the Scottish Fairies, Modan grapples with the politics of gender-identity, principles of self-expression, and the way in which we attempt to control the behavior of those we most love in an effort to protect our own self-image.    

It's a story as old as time with a solution that is as good as can be imagined in a fallible world full of fallible people, reflecting e.e. cummings' shrewd observation that 

[t]o be nobody-but-yourself---in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--- means to fight hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." 

e.e. cummings