The Green-Eyed Monster

The Green-Eyed Monster

I said I would tell the truth.  One thing I have learned in the last few months is that the rawness of grief puts you and your emotions on display for all to see…the good, the bad… and the ugly. 

   I used to think I knew what envy was.  When I was young, I thought it was wishing my body looked like someone else’s.  As I got older, it was the heated, lustful glance to the girl in the room who always had a new outfit on, or the just right shoes.  As an adult, it was the moment I took to ponder what it would be like to have enough money to not have to worry about the bills, and be able to walk out of the grocery story with essentially anything you wanted.  What would it be like to think on Tuesday it might be nice to have a gazebo in your back yard, and be sitting in it by Friday? 

            By the time I was in my mid-thirties, separated from my husband, a divorce looming, and trying to make an impossible relationship work, it was my sisters’ Pandora bracelets.  I remember watching them comparing beads at Sunday afternoon, and pretending not to care.  I was polite enough to compliment them, but employed a studied casual disinterest.  They weren’t really my style.  Sniff. 

            Oh, but it wasn’t the beads themselves (beautiful enamel, glass, and sterling silver that they were).  They were just the symbols.  What I envied went so much deeper.  I longed fiercely for what they had, and may or may not even think twice about- they were both in healthy relationships with mentally stable men, and those men were fully employed, contributing to the household, and the livelihood of their mutual children.  Their husbands worked hard to give them small treasures.  They belonged to someone.  They belonged to someone who was able to give them what they needed, and sometimes even what they wanted.  They could wait for each bead to come, without feeling frantic or anxious (as I always did those days) because they knew their husbands were in it for the long haul, and those beads would just keep rolling along- like the paychecks, like the sobriety, like the stable mental health.  Now that’s some envy right there.

            So now, this tight feeling in my chest whenever I see my sister’s face?  This tendency to drop my head, this refusal to meet her eyes, this temptation to walk the other way when I see her coming?  All because her daughter is alive and well, doing all the things my daughter never even got to try-  what’s the word for that feeling?

            Is that envy?  If so, what does it look like?  I bet if someone held a mirror up to my face the next time she is in my line of sight, I’d get a real good picture.   And it wouldn’t be a pretty one. 

They don’t call it the green-eyed monster for nothing.