Hey Jealousy

There is something about the song "Bittersweet Symphony" by the Verve that always makes me feel like I am in a movie. I believe that the only time I hear it is when I am having an ah-ha! moment, which usually pertains to life, and usually occurs while I am driving. Life is a bittersweet symphony. Those are pretty much the only words in the song, yet the message is carried through the entire 3 minutes or so. Maybe it's the violins in the background. Whenever I hear the violins opening the song, I cannot help but smile and think that eh, life isn't as bad as I think it is.

Today when it came on, I was driving to my tutoring lesson and I was thinking about an email I received from my Ant D. It was in response to the time we had spent together on Saturday. It was such a beautifully written letter so full of the love and emotion that both of us have kept from each other and the rest of our extended family for years. In it she had highlighted certain anxieties that occur in her and other members of the family that I had never known about. I laughed (and teared up) while reading it because it reminded me of a conversation my sister and I had recently. My sister pointed out the fact that most of our female cousins close to us in age have children. Correction: They are all mothers to gorgeous children. Whenever we have family gatherings, my sister and I watch on as they watch over their children. We were jealous of them. They all have never ending bonds with these amazing kids and we don't. We don't have anybody to wake up to in the morning. We don't have little bodies running around pretending to make us breakfast out of whatever they can grab in the kitchen. We don't have the pleasure of listening to our daughter's excitement over going to school in the fall or talking to our son while he has a blue Kool-Aid mustache.

The whole time, we had been jealous of them, they were jealous of us. The cake topper is that we don't even know each other well enough to justify our jealousy! [Insert Ah-ha! moment here...Jealousy can never really be justified...unless you try reeeeeaaaallly hard]. The whole time we were jealous, we had added in the extra husband factor, which in my naive mind meant nothing but happiness. The bottom line is that, and I am only speaking for myself here, I have always pictured my cousins as embodying the ideals of the "other world" that I do not have. I was ignorant of the fact that their path can and has caused problems similar to mine.

As much as I bitch, kick, scream and fight my way through life, I would not trade mine or any aspect of it. Correction: I would trade Loverboy's desire to read the new Harry Potter book tonight instead of talking to me.