"Family" is a fluid concept these days. Perhaps it always was, outside the confines of the conservative media.

An acquaintance recently became the father of an adorable and much-wanted baby girl. The event should be an occasion of congratulations and best wishes, and so it is, except for a sizeable majority who don’t think he deserved the chance to be a parent, due to what they term his ‘lifestyle’ and ‘ungodly behaviour’. The man is single and gay. He has a good job, a fine home, a supportive family, a live-in nanny, and a puppy already in residence.

His only involvement with the law has been his choice of career—and maybe a parking ticket or two. He has more to offer this child than many less fortunate heterosexual folk as far as worldly goods. He has the same capability for love, dedication and the reading of The Very Hungry Caterpillar thrice a day as any other father. Why is this apparently not sufficient qualification for parenthood? Why is this new little family termed “unnatural”?

One argument has it that every child should have a mother and a father. That might be true, but how many children do? Suppose the gay man had been straight, married, and his wife had died soon after childbirth? Would that family of father and child be ‘unnatural’? Suppose a mother found herself with a newborn and suddenly minus the man who fathered the child—as happens all too often, going by the statistics. Would that mother and child be a family?

When I was born, I was brought home to a huge old farmhouse inhabited by two parents, a grandmother, a great grandmother, two teenaged aunts, and assorted visiting great aunts and uncles who came and stayed until they fell afoul of my great-grandmother's temper. Some were hardier than others in this department. I grew up assuming that this was a ‘normal’ family—four generations under one big roof.

The big old farmhouse had been purchased by my paternal grandfather, son of immigrants. He had worked his way into the upper middle class and proved it by buying not only the house in the country, but also a 16-cylinder Cadillac, with which to commute to the city job that supported the new lifestyle. He didn’t have long to enjoy the life of a country gentleman. Family legend has it that he flew into a rage with a cabdriver which precipitated a cascade of heart attacks that carried him off shortly after his 48^th birthday. (irrelevant footnote: he was born and died a Leo, as am I—but apparently he wasn’t one of the sunny-natured ones, just the money-making type.)

The big house continued sheltering the widow and four children until gutted by a chimney fire in 1940. Rebuilding, with World War II about to start, meant cutting corners and trimming sails. The third floor was left gableless and unfinished; there were no servants to sleep in it now. Some much-needed redesign of the 1840 carcass was overseen by my father, a civil engineer with strong architectural talents. That was fortunate, because he met and married a young nurse, bringing her back to the renovated house. I arrived, but my uncle departed, going off to give Hitler and Mussolini a bit of New England “what-for”.

A few years later the uncle returned, married, and settled into a few rooms carved out of the old haybarn and stables. As the uncle came home, my father left, going off to the Pacific War to do his bit. (Tojo never succeeded in finding and bombing that Armed Forces Radio station!) Later, the family grew to include a sister for me, despite my request for a puppy. The uncle and his bride produced their first two children before moving up the road and around the corner. That part of the family eventually numbered seven souls.

The teenaged aunts grew up and married and the great-grandma died. The visiting great aunts and uncles thinned out, but two remained to come and visit for greater or lesser periods depending on how long it was before a fight broke out with my grandmother, who had inherited her mother's mantle of periodic wrath. Since both of my aunts and uncle had moved only a few hundred yards away, half a mile at most, family get-togethers were huge affairs, with up to 13 first cousins milling around the barbecue. Weddings and funerals brought another 60-odd people onto the scene: second cousins, in-laws and so on.

Then my sister and I grew up and moved out, and later my sister moved back, bringing a husband and two children and stayed for 16 years before building her own house and moving out again—but just down the road and around another corner. The family was reduced to the parents and their cat, who rattled around in the big house until it got too much, and they moved to a retirement settlement. The house was bought by a new family—a childless pair of professionals who were able to give the old place the care and funding it needed to move fully into the 20^th century.

I'm not sure at what point the families in the house on Elm Street could have been labelled 'normal', 'ordinary', 'usual' or 'standard'. For only a few years in its evolution did the house shelter two parents and 2.4 children living in their own home, with a spotted dog.

It was often irritating to be part of my family: you couldn't always find silence or privacy. On the other hand, if you fell out with your mother, you could always find refuge with an aunt or grandma. If your sister was busy, you could find a cousin to play with. On the down side, as the eldest cousin you got pressed into babysitting, often unpaid. On the up side, you learned early how to manage a bunch of kids, which later proved to be excellent grounding for how to conduct a meeting of workmates or fellow volunteers. I picked up a lot of what are now called 'life skills' without realising it.

I now live far away from that big old farmhouse—43º South latitude rather than 42º North--but looking around neighbourhoods I’ve lived in, I can see a lot of different groups that still manage to function as families. The young couple next door with their five children; the man on the other side who's by himself but sustained by regular visitations of sisters and their children; the widow, her son and her girlfriend who live one street over; the divorced sisters up the road; my husband and me and our cats: all of us are functioning as families, but only the people next door would have fit the traditional definition. (Even they might not now be termed ‘normal’—five children? Don’t they have a television?)

Perhaps families are like carrots: given optimum conditions and smooth beds, they are 'normal', 'standard', 'ordinary'. But put them in stony soil where they have to cope with obstacles, or beetles, or too much or too little water, they will develop in different ways, with lumps and bumps and perhaps appearing stunted or twisted--but they're still carrots and they're still useful and tasty, and arguably all the more interesting for their oddities..