Envy

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 10:24 pm by Calah Alexander

Envy 2017-03-09T22:24:33-05:00 Calah Alexander

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Envy

I don’t know about you guys, but when I do an examination of conscience, there are several sins that I come back to again and again. They’re the sins I battle, the ones I’m aware of, the ones I gird myself against and know enough to keep an eye out for in unexpected places.

Then there are the other sins, the ones that have never really been on my radar. Stealing is one of them. Envy is another.

Sure, I did my fair share of envying in high school, when I wanted every girl’s body but my own. I can remember the angsty hours in the locker room after cheerleading practice, where I changed quickly while trying to keep my not-quite-concave stomach covered so that the girls with the flat, enviable abs didn’t see the softness on mine. I remember how they paraded around, or so it seemed to me, with only their sports bras and soffie shorts on, chatting unconcernedly, as if they didn’t quite realize that their stomachs were the stuff my teenage dreams were made of.

But that was years ago. Having children forces one to make peace with one’s body. Mine still isn’t where I’d like it to be, and there’s quite a bit more softness along my mid-section than there was during my fairly slim high school days. But I’ve matured enough to know that if I want my stomach not to be soft, all I have to do is stop eating Cadbury chocolate and start doing crunches and going running. It’s not really a hard equation. However, I happen to love Cadbury chocolate and loathe crunches, so I’m soft. And when I see my lovely, lithe sister-in-law in her bikini with her post-children six-pack, I’m not jealous. I can admire her finely tuned physique without bitterly wishing that I looked like that as well. Because, well, I could look like that if I wanted to. Not exactly like that, but good enough in my own way. She makes the hard choices. I don’t. And I respect her for that.

Since I’ve never been particularly materialistic, that’s the only place where envy really got to me. I’ve never seen someone carrying a Burberry purse and felt that heart-twisting, “Why do they deserve that and I don’t?” bitterness. I think fashionable things are pretty, and I can admire them from a distance without envying those who can afford them.

But yesterday, envy snuck up on me. I’m house-and-dog-sitting for the weekend for my brother and sister-in-law (yes, the lithe one). The Ogre couldn’t catch a flight out until after the weekend, so happily he is still here with us, and we get to spend our last weekend as a family for a while in his brother’s awesome new house in Dallas. Alone, with just the five of us.

It was so thoughtful of them to ask us to stay at their house. It gives us a chance to have some quiet, to have our own space, and to just enjoy being a family again without worrying about other people’s schedules and rules. So we’ve all been excited about it, and even more so when we found out that the Ogre (who flies standby) couldn’t get a seat on a plane until after the holiday weekend.

Their house is beautiful. It was a stroke of good fortune combined with a great deal of hard work and a lot of sacrifice that enabled them to get it, and it is amazing. Great, quiet neighborhood, walking distance from a nice Catholic church, hardwood floors, brand-new appliances, big back yard, tons of windows and natural light, a kitchen that makes me weak in the knees, big flat-screens with cable, a Wii, Netflix streaming hooked up to their gorgeous televisions…in short, their house is my dream.

And through another stroke of good luck, they just got a huge… huge… discount on a brand-new, very expensive, L-shaped sofa. It’s like heaven, right in the middle of their living room. My brother-in-law was telling me the story of how they got it last night when suddenly I realized what that nasty feeling in my soul was.

Envy.

Not a nice, “wow you guys are lucky! I hope we can be lucky some day too!” No, a nasty, soul-killing, “I can’t believe you guys get all the luck while we work almost as hard and have 1/100th the material possessions that you do” kind of resentment.

I love my brother-in-law and his wife. They are so wonderful, and they deserve this house. They’ve worked hard for it over the years, and they’ve made a lot of tough decisions to save money. She deserves that kitchen. They even deserve their ridiculously overpriced sofa! And I hate that I felt angry at them for having things that I wanted, even for a moment.

I hoped that the feeling would go away, but today I’ve been puttering around in the kitchen making the Ogre some of his favorite things (drip beef sandwiches and snickerdoodles) and I keep having to get a grip on myself. I hear the kids come in from the back yard and want to cry because I know it will be years before I can send them outside into a yard we own. I notice a beam of sunlight on the hardwood floor and want to throw my head into my hands and wail to the universe that it’s so unfair that I’ll likely never be able to afford hardwood floors of my own. I’m even envious of the work that comes attached to owning a home. My sister-in-law apologized for asking me to water her flowers, not a small task, and I almost laughed. I’m looking forward to watering them! I wish I had my own yard to work in, to dig up, to plant and to sweat in.

The Ogre and I have chosen a path that we probably won’t see much money from. We chose our work for love, not for money. For the love of literature in part, but mostly for the love of other people. The Ogre wants to shape minds, to save them from the soul-numbing abyss of most of modern academia. He wants to be a life-line to these vulnerable, impressionable college students, to show them beauty and truth.

And it’s worth being poor for. It’s a work worth doing. If we had to make the choice again we’d make the same one, even knowing the poverty we would face for it.

But it’s still hard to face what we won’t have. It’s hard knowing that raising children in apartments is a very real possibility. It’s hard knowing that while all of our friends and family are seeing material gain from all the work they’ve put in over the years, buying new and better houses, investing in stocks, buying new cars, and taking trips to Sonoma and LA, we’re living in other people’s houses and deciding not to make pancakes because we can’t afford maple syrup.

It seems that envy has made a hideous re-appearance on the battlefield of my spiritual life. I’d really like to snuff it out, but how does one go about that? Having never really struggled with this, I’m at a loss as to how to go about heading it off. I know that a lot of you who read my blog have been in similar places. How did you deal with having little when others around you had so much?

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