We no longer think of family the same way we did in the fifties and early sixties. We’re not the Ozzie and Harriet family, nor were we ever. And we’re not The Jeffersons, although that one comes closer. Birth puts us in a pool with those of common genetics, but this doesn’t mean we’re going to like, or even abide, one another. Romance and marriage come closer to creating a true sense of family, but even here I have to quote Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

A couple of years back, I wrote a novel in which a patched-together family, including a widowed woman of middle age, Mattie, who lived with her mother and an elderly man of no relation. And Mattie’s only son was gay. This poor, struggling family counterpointed another, the well-to-do Gaines family who, despite family ties and affluence, dwelled, shall we say, on the dark side of life.

One might say that Mattie’s family came together and stayed out of human necessity, while the Gaines crowd had ample elbowroom to fight among themselves and to engage in nefarious pursuits. While there’s more than a spark of truth to this, it hardly completes the picture.

Today’s social and individual freedom gives us the opportunity to accept conventional ties, but it also allows us to look beyond them. I’ve been married twice, first to a woman with three children, whom I came to love as my own. And they’re still in my life. My second marriage has been one of two childless professionals marrying in middle age. And as I think about it, my personal history, particularly the first marriage, was the inspiration for the novel I mentioned. It was hardly a big seller, but it did strike chords with those who read it. Why? I suspect because my readers either identified with the loving way the oddities of Mattie’s family came together and stayed together. Or, perhaps, they felt the cold chill of kinship with the Gaines gang.

Seen in this light, are today’s so-called non-traditional families a pox on society, a cancerous outgrowth of permissiveness? Hardly. Some familial aggregations of this sort may have come together for the wrong reasons, but all were looking for a way to fulfill the oddities of our personal makeup through some sort of kinship with others. These cobbled-together families may never supplant the traditional, nuclear family, but they will affect it. I suspect that as the more traditional among us seek a deeper sense of permanence in their relationships, they’ll find it buried in the oddities of life, as Mattie’s family did, and perhaps as you and I have done.

Bob Mustin has been a North Carolina Writers Network writer-in-residence at Peace College under Doris Betts' guiding hand. In the early '90s, he was the editor of a small literary journal, The Rural Sophisticate, based in Georgia. His work has appeared in The Rockhurst Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Cooweescoowee, Under The Sun, Gihon River Review, Reflections Literary Journal, and at thesquaretable.com, raving dove, Sport Literate, The Externalist, Language and Culture, and R.KV.R.Y in electronic form. Bob's nonfiction appeared in Issue #4 of The Externalist.