​This project explores three interconnected areas of human experience: the transition to parenting, living as a sexual minority, and the formation of friendships and support networks. My interest in these topics stems from my own experience as a lesbian who, during the course of this research, adopted two children and navigated the changing social networks associated with becoming a parent. While I developed many meaningful and supportive relationships, I also experienced losses, and although I was generally welcomed into predominantly heterosexual parenting circles, I became aware of subtle differences in the nature and structure of the social connections formed by myself and my partner. These experiences prompted my initial research question: "Why does my parenting network look and feel different from those of my heterosexual friends?" To investigate this, I recruited 12 households, resulting in 23 individual interviews and 10 follow-up couple interviews. In two-parent households, partners were interviewed separately before taking part in a joint reflective interview. Prior to the first interview, participants created a visual representation of their parenting support network using a selection of provided materials. The initial semi-structured interviews explored participants' histories alongside discussions of their diagrams, while the follow-up interviews encouraged couples to reflect together on emerging themes and make sense of their experiences. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and thematically coded. This design generated three complementary forms of data: participants' explanations of their visual representations, their individual interview responses, and the conversations captured during the couple interviews. Although a common coding framework was applied, analysis remained sensitive to the differing contexts in which the data were produced. The use of participant-generated visual methods alongside traditional interviews was intended to facilitate reflection and position participants as experts in interpreting their own social worlds, consistent with the work of Rose (2012) and Mannay (2010). The combination of mapping and collage offered a practical yet creative means of eliciting rich discussion while minimising participant burden. By encouraging participants to represent their everyday relationships visually, the method helped make routine and often overlooked aspects of social life more visible, prompting deeper reflection on how support networks were formed, maintained, and experienced.