. . . a particular modern regret:
She never spoke of regrets she felt that she had not married and had a family and that she had probably now reached an age where that was no longer likely to happen. She never let on that she had ever wanted a child. Nobody who knew her would ever have suspected that Karen Meadows was anything other than a happy, successful, fulfilled woman.
This is by mystery writer Hilary Bonner, When the Dead Cry Out (Leisure Books 2006). She is introducing a detective with a cold case about a woman and two children who disappeared twenty-seven years earlier.
The fictional Karen Meadows's regrets (and self-doubts) are, of course, not peculiarly modern but are particularly modern. Our culture devalues marriage and provides no useful substitute -- there being none -- for a family. In her case that would be a husband and children.
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