What a great question, yoyobon, and so eloquently stated. I love your line that says: "I wish that I'd been able to give them a perfect life instead of having to tuck them into the drama that was my fractured reality." Beautiful. I can relate to your children being your joy in life; I feel the same way about my children, and, like you, I often think I should have done a better job of guiding them into adulthood.

There have been many passages in many books that have had a strong effect on me. However, I'm sad to say that I rarely record them anywhere, so recalling them is never easy. I'm going to look, though, and see if I can find any of those passages.

I kept thinking about your question, and trying to remember any books/passages that have affected me strongly. Then I accidentally found one. It's a children's book (a Newberry Medal winner) titled "Sarah, Plain and Tall" by Patricia MacLachlan.

I can't really quote a particular passage because you need to read the story get the overall feeling. It's only 58 pages total, but to me the writing is simple yet amazing. It always chokes me up. I would highly recommend it.

And I will keep thinking on this question.

Yes I of late have noticed myself in several novels.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, I can relate to her lots.

Also Doris Lessing's female characters.

In a book "Grumpy Old Holidays" one of the women interviewed said that she always goes shopping after a holiday to get the items she could have done with on that holiday, which perfectly prepares her for the holiday she just had.
That's me!

While I was reading Nick Hornsby's How To Be Good I was continuously astounded that he had captured my thought processes and put them down in print for everyone to see. I was a bit upset with him, to be honest. I am absolutely nothing like the protagonist, but I would really like to know how he got inside my head and figured out how I think.

On another note, I once picked up a book and discovered the main character had my name, first and last, and also had a dog by the same name as my dog!

siobhan -- Now that's just eerie. I hope it wasn't a murder mystery. :0

Though I am ambivalent about the work of Barbara Pym as a whole, I remember my blood running cold with recogniation when I read the following:

How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity.

I forget which novel contained this excerpt, but years ago I wrote it out during an especially "blue period".

Tim, is that Iris Murdoch's The Bell?

When I was struck with a serious bout of depression, I found two books that helped me realize that I wasn't the only person in the world to feel that way:

* Tracy Thompson's The Beast
* William Styron's Darkness Visible

Both of these authors put into words the darkness that I felt inside me. They're difficult to read now as I am in a very different "place", but back then, they were perfect.

YoYo - I think that most parents wish they could have done a "better job" with their kids - but you know, as the saying goes, "You did the best you could with what you had at the time"....

Siobhan, I think it is from Barbara Pym's novel Excellent Women. The novel concerns disturbances in the life of a genteel spinster in her thirties. The quotation really summed up how I felt about my late thirties as well. Many times in my twenties I would think that I'd have everything figured out by my thirties. When I actually reached that decade, I found all the usual stress and worries stayed the same, but that I had to face them without the confidence and optimism of youth. By my forties I stopped caring about much which made me anxious before, but these cares were replaced by new ones.

Well, I can see you are "pups"! Rueing your lost youth when you are forty?!
Wait until your sixties!
Then fears and worries are replaced by a sort of dreary grim reality.
I admire those women ahead of me who are teaching me by their example how to age sucessfully and live their life fully to the last gasp.
I chuckled yesterday in reading the obits ....one beautiful woman was remembered as "leaving this life full of the grace and dignity with which she had lived".
Beautiful.
Yet I couldn't imagine anyone saying that of me....more probably: She left this life kicking and screaming , trying to wring out the last drop from it!

It is especially disturbing to feel that perhaps there are few dreams left to realize.....and worse, that those which have been realized have crumbed to dust through the use and abuse of days.

There's an answer out there somewhere.....and I'm not going until I fully understand it!!
LOL.

It has been years since I read The World According to Garp, but there was a line that was/has been so true to my life...

Sometimes the only thing you can salvage from a day is what you make for dinner.

I have found cooking a solace, a healer, a peace offering, an escape, for most of my life and that line sums it up.