I am reminded of the lyrics of Mike And The Mechanics' The Living Years, "Every generation, Blames the one before, And all of their frustrations, Come beating on your door."

Not only have you not mentioned how old your parents were when they had you, but there's something you need to be aware of, too. Some of the older Generation X (late 60s) were conceived at a time when the old values of the 1950s clashed with the liberation of the 1960s.

If you are a Boomer, chances are, if you were born between 1946 and 1948, your father walked down the gangplank of a ship, dressed in a creamy khaki uniform, and into the arms of the girlfriend he'd been writing to from an island in the Pacific and he may have been in Iwo Jima or Okinawa, and was just glad to be home. And with the USA an emerging hegemon, opportunities were plentiful.

And some members of Generation X, particularly those with younger parents at the time, were not conceived post marriage. There were, indeed, young men who might have been at college or pumping gasoline at a filling station, who had a conservative man with a short back and sides haircut, dressed in a cardigan over a sports shirt and trousers, facing them in the lounge room, pipe in his mouth, who told him that his daughter was pregnant and that he had to marry her. In some cases, those parents didn't really know each other.

I'm sorry that your parents weren't there for you, but did you ever think that maybe it was your parents not an entire generation?

And let's not forget something else. There are a number of Generation X people, who are now in their 50s, who, when they were old enough, found that the woman they thought was their older sister was actually their mother and their grandparents have told them that they were their parents and they were a late child.