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TO MAKE MEANING OF LIFE

When I was seventeen, my parents divorced. In retrospect, it’s not so much the divorce that was painful, it was everything that it meant—that my parents didn’t really love each other, that maybe they never had (my mom was pregnant when they married), that they weren’t happy. As their oldest child, I wondered if perhaps things might have been different if only I’d been brilliant enough or attractive enough. Or would they even have married if I hadn’t been born?

Sharing those memories is still painful, even decades after the fact; but as I get older, I recognize that some of my greatest strengths were born of that sadness. For example, my desire to have a happy marriage and a happy family life is resolute. Period. (My ...

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