Watching a friend’s happy family makes me feel pangs of jealousy

By David McElroy · June 2, 2019

The feeling crept up on me so gradually that I didn’t see it coming, but I’ve realized lately that I’m envious of my friend’s happy family.

It’s not a negative thing. I don’t resent what he has. In fact, I get a warm feeling of happiness about what they are. I’m just ready to have the same sort of happy family, too.

My friend mentioned to me this week that they’re all — parents and two children — about to go on vacation together for a couple of weeks. In an email this afternoon, I told him what I’d been thinking.

“I’m envious that you guys are going on a nice vacation together, but I’m even more envious of you having a great family to spend the time with,” I wrote. “At this point in my life, I’m painfully aware of how much I dislike not having a family. It’s funny how so many of our regrets in life are based on specific decisions we wish we had made differently.”

And then I told him about a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I dreamed I was in their home for a social visit, but I wasn’t alone. I had brought my wife. In the dream, I was married to someone from my past, someone who would have been a good wife for me. I think I dreamed it because they are people she would have liked, and I think they would have liked her.

In the dream, I was happy and I was proud to be with her. I felt a sense of satisfaction which I haven’t felt in real life for a very long time. It was like a Charles Dickensesque scene of “what might have been” if my life had been just a little bit different.

My would-be wife is smart and educated and charming and likable. My friend and his wife are remarkably like her in these respects. All three of them are very impressive people. Spending time with them together in the dream made my heart ache for “what might have been.”

I wouldn’t really want to be someone else, of course. Even though I’m envious of my friend’s marriage and family, I wouldn’t swap places with him. I don’t want to be him. I want to be me. I just want to finally have what I’ve come close to having before.

Nobody’s life is perfect. If you knew him well enough, my friend could share with you all the ways in which he would like his life to improve. He could tell you about the problems he’s been through and the struggles he’s had to deal with. So it’s not that I think he has a perfect life.

I’m closer right now to having my life where I need it to be than I was a year ago, certainly closer than I was five years ago. But I’m still not there. I have professional and creative mountains still to climb. I have financial mountains I’m starting to climb. Progress is frustratingly slow.

But I can deal with all of that. I’m confident that I’ll get to where I need to be in those ways. The real question — and the one which haunts me — is about the family I want.

If I achieve all of those things I’m working toward and have no wife who loves me and needs me, well, it will have been worthless to me, no matter how well I do. But with love — and especially with a family — the struggle would be worth it.

I know what I want when I see it. I don’t often see it, but I feel some envy when I do.

I’m envious of a family going on vacation to a nice place together, but it’s not the vacation I’m envious about. It’s not their nice destination I care about.

If I had a wife who loved me and children who felt loved and nurtured, it wouldn’t matter where we vacationed. It wouldn’t even matter if we didn’t vacation at all. It would only matter to be with them — as a loving and happy family.

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Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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