Envy Part One

There were many things I envied as a child. I wanted an Atari game system, and a Merlin. I wanted a vacuum cleaner and real gold earrings. I wanted a dad who would go off to work, so I could have my mom at home. Wanting these things wasn't going to bring them into actualization, and I did just fine without them. Sometimes it was painful to see my friends' birthday and christmas presents that far outstripped my own. It was the pain of a child who knows it's just the way things are, yet it still seems unjust. Sometimes I felt very isolated, more often I felt like I somehow wasn't good enough. I did a lot of good deeds hoping that just one more would put us over the top, and presents would flow my family's way.
I didn't get that we got Catholic school instead of expensive presents. I knew mom was making tough choices everyday, and that each choice was intended to give my sister and I a better future. I didn't know why we couldn't have school and an Atari. My sister's best friend had a lot of money, but I wouldn't trade with her for the world. The money came from her dad's pension, because her dad was dead. She had a lot of stuff, but she didn't have joy. I got to see firsthand the difference between earning your toys and having them handed to you on a silver platter. She seemed to get a new, pricey toy every month, and she didn't value any of them. I know she would have given it all up to see her dad's face just one more time.

I thought I knew envy, and then I went to public school. I met kids on welfare, living in section 8 housing with better clothes than me. When I transferred to Waring, it was in the middle of the school year. Mom had already spent her money on school uniforms, and we had very little left. She decided to skip the gas bill for a month and took me shopping for school clothes instead. We bought one pair of jeans and three shirts. The welfare kids teased me because I wore the same pair of jeans every day. We went to the laundromat every other week, so my jeans saw a lot of handwashing in the tub. I went to school with damp jeans quite a bit, because the only way to dry them was to hang them over the heater vent in the hallway. Mom went to the carnival supply store and bought hooks that looked like fingers, and screwed one into the plaster wall. She let me paint the fingernail red, and that became my "jeans hook". It was pretty cool.
One day in January, the seat of my jeans tore. They were so worn out there was no real way to patch them. The fabric wasn't strong enough to hold the stitches. The school wouldn't send me home, so I endured the teasing for the rest of the day and walked home from the bus stop with my winter coat tied around my waist so no one could see. It was one of those moments that still makes me squirm inside when I think about it. I'm a redhead, so I'm used to teasing. Yet, no amount of "carrot top" or "Woo! Red!" had prepared me for ripping my only pair of jeans.

My Aunt came by that night with an armload of clothes for me. She was very angry at my mom for not saying something sooner. All the clothes were hand-me-downs, and I didn't want to wear her bell bottom jeans with stars on the butt. The shirts were pretty cool, and she even brought me a blue fuzzy sweater. I wore the sweater the next day, along with the bell bottoms, and those unmerciful bastard children started calling me "Salvation Army Reject". They probably thought it hurt my feelings, but cast off clothes were better than holey jeans any day, and at least I wasn't on welfare. The first time I opened my mouth and said "Yeah, well, my momma works for a living," I almost got my ass kicked. They didn't want to hear that, and they went in search of easier prey.
I did envy the welfare kids for having things we couldn't afford, but it was still that kind of "somehow I'm not good enough" kind of envy. I experienced the true green-eyed monster when we had a dress-up day at school, everyone was supposed to dress like babies. A friend of mine, who weighed over 300 pounds, came to school in footie pajamas. He was 6'3", and his mother had made them by hand just for the occasion. I was so jealous, because that's the kind of thing my mom would have done for me, if she had had the time - if she weren't working all the time. Nobody teased him - they all thought it was as cool as I did.