The composition of American families has been changing for years. Female heads of household, grandparents raising grandchildren, gay couples, and so forth. Now the current crisis is throwing even more extended families together, not for social reasons but for economic.

My baby blues were opened to this when I took a look around me. One friend is living with her husband, their adopted child, an adult niece and her pre-teen daughter. I myself am living with my Sis and her Significant Other. We share food, utilities, and chores like any family. The biggest difference, I suppose, is that placing various life experiences under one roof broadens the worldliness of the family. We haven’t all spent decades forming each other’s beliefs. This can be refreshing, mind opening, and a crazy-making pain in the ass.

I visited a good friend this week. Over time I have gotten close to her husband and daughter as well. The daughter is a thirty-something divorcee, a fire-breathing top executive recently escaped from the tomfoolery of the banking industry. She is battle scarred although the wounds are beginning to heal as much as I can tell. She knows she may not be a rising star again, but has traded that for the chance to live a life where she has at least a measure of control over issues involving right and wrong.

She has sold her house and moved back in with her parents, a different human being from the college girl who left years ago. Of course, her parents have changed as well, no longer as indestructible as parents seem when we are young. They have had great difficulty not so much living up to each other’s expectations, but understanding each other’s expectations. For now they fight, they cajole, they spar to establish territorial imperative.

Because my own family has never been so confrontational, they sometimes scare me. I worry the fabric that binds them together might unravel. But I don’t think they worry about it because they share. Everybody is warm, everybody eats, everybody does chores, everybody listens when another states his or her mind. Maybe that fabric is tough as steel wool after all.

Back when the beasts were still stumbling around in the La Brea tar pits, Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Here, on the back nine, I hope that kind of home is available to you all when you need it most.