Fundamental shifts in state intervention in recent years have resulted in steady curtailment in public provision of community and social care. A longitudinal study of elderly women receiving home care in Ontario explored the reverberations of these shifts in the texture of frail elderly people's lives. Three distinct accounts of negotiating unstable and rationed home care were discernible. Taking charge was an active account of women successfully impressing their particular needs and identities on home care provision. Pushed over the edge was a vulnerable account of insufficient and depersonalised care in which participants felt themselves practically and emotionally out of control. In Restraining expectations, women adjusted silently to the shortcomings of home care, stoically making themselves smaller as they found their previous orbits and identities unsupported. Home care's front line emerged as a complex site of struggle for identity and agency – a struggle in which elderly people engage with inventiveness and determination but also with dwindling support, few witnesses and in mounting isolation.