Until fairly recently, what parents wanted was utterly beside the point. But we now live in an age when the map of our desires has gotten considerably larger, and we’ve been told it’s our right (obligation, in fact) to try to fulfill them. In an end-of-the-millennium essay, the historian J. M. Roberts wrote: “The 20th century has spread as never before the idea that human happiness is realizable on Earth.” That’s a wonderful thing, of course, but not always a realistic goal, and when reality falls short of expectations, we often blame ourselves. “Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and
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