Sandy,

I have always thought Love meant wishing the best for that person no matter what. That if you really loved someone you let them go !! you let them fly away and if they come back then you know that they truly love you and if not then it was never meant to be. One who envies what another has is unfullfilled and bitter becaause they could never see loves simplisity.

Medieval theologianThomas Aquinas said of Envy: "Envy according to the aspect of its object is contrary to charity, whence the soul derives its spiritual life... Charity rejoices in our neighbor's good, while envy grieves over it." ... Envy. Sinopsis. What it is: Envy is the desire for others' traits, status, abilities, or situation ...

Sandy,

I have to think how I want to reply as I can see some similarities. However I chose to " forgive" my mother and now we get on well. I had a choice to have a family or not, I decided i wanted a family and I began to see things differently, and behave differently. It wasnt easy or quick. I dont think she has really forgiven me, but thats another story

I hope you understand what i am trying to say

Mary

Mary,

i do forgive my mother. just because i forgive my mother doesn't mean that i forget who she is, though. i have also changed my behavior a great deal and do not really react to my mother's insanity by acting out or lashing out at her. however, how do you think that i should have reacted to her hitting my father? turn the other cheek and walk away? and to her attacking and physically assaulting me because i picked up the phone to call his case manager? allow myself to be assu=alted? i think not. what i didn't do, which i am proud of, is not raise my voice, insult her, or attack her, phsycally or emotionally. what i did do was to call my dad's case manager, tell her what happened in a way that was sympathetic to both of my parents, and get my mom to agree to a social work home study/evaluation. the case manager, who is my father's visiting nurse as well, now comes to check my dad and change his bandages on his bedsores three times a week, instead of twice a week. i called my mom's shrink and told him what happened so that he can change her medication and treatment plan; she is now on more antidepressants, thought she swears that he raised them before this incident. i also defended myself against my mom's physical attack by throwing her off me when she pinned me to the bed. lastly, i told my mom this week that it is inappropirate for her to hit me or hit my dad, and that if she hits me again i will defend myself again, and if she hits my dad again i would call adult protective services and make a report on her behavior.

i really am not interested whether or not my mom forgives me or not.

i appreciate your imput, and am sorry that you have a difficult situation with your mom. people in Western society have elevated the myth of sacred motherhood to the spiritual equivalent of the Ten Commandments, but it ain't necessarily so.

sandy

after googling Joseph Epstein (thank you, Mom!) , i feel that i must share his essay on envy with everyone.

The Green-Eyed Monster

Envy is nothing to be jealous of.

By Joseph Epstein

 

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all. Sloth may not seem that enjoyable, nor anger either, but giving way to deep laziness has its pleasures, and the expression of anger entails a release that is not without its small delights. In recompense, envy may be the subtlest--perhaps I should say the most insidious--of the seven deadly sins. Surely it is the one that people are least likely to want to own up to, for to do so is to admit that one is probably ungenerous, mean, small-hearted. It may also be the most endemic. Apart from Socrates, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, and only a few others, at one time or another, we have all felt flashes of envy, even if in varying intensities, from its minor pricks to its deep, soul-destroying, lacerating stabs. So widespread is it--a word for envy, I have read, exists in all known languages--that one is ready to believe it is the sin for which the best argument can be made that it is part of human nature.

 

In politics, envy, or at any rate the hope of eliminating it, is said to be the reigning principle of socialism, as greed is said to be that of capitalism (though modern capitalist advertising is about few things more than the regular stimulation of envy). On the international scene, many if not most wars have been fought because of one nation's envy of another's territory and all they derive from it, or out of jealously guarded riches that a nation feels are endangered by those less rich who are likely to be envious of their superior position. In this connection, it is difficult not to feel that, at least in part, much of the anti-American feeling that arose after September 11, 2001, had envy, some of it fairly rancorous, at its heart. In the magazine Granta, the Indian writer Ramachandra Guha wrote that "historically, anti-Americanism in India was shaped by an aesthetic distaste for America's greatest gift--the making of money." But can "aesthetic distaste" here be any more than a not-very-well-disguised code word for envy?

 

Is envy a "feeling," an "emotion," a "sin," a "temperamental disposition," or a "world-view"? Might it also be a Rorschach test: Tell what you envy, and you reveal a great deal about yourself. It can be all of these things--and more. No one would doubt that, whatever else it is, envy is certainly a charged, indeed a supercharged, word: One of the few words left in the English language that retains the power to scandalize. Most of us could still sleep decently if accused of any of the other six deadly sins; but to be accused of envy would be seriously distressing, so clearly does such an accusation go directly to character. The other deadly sins, though all have the disapproval of religion, do not so thoroughly, so deeply demean, diminish, and disqualify a person. Not the least of its stigmata is the pettiness implicit in envy.

 

The Webster's definition of the word won't quite do: "(1) Obs. malice; (2) painful or resentful awareness of the advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage." The Oxford English Dictionary is rather better: It defines envy first as "malignant or hostile feeling; ill-will, malice, enmity," and then as "active evil, harm, mischief," both definitions accounted Obscure. But the great OED only gets down to serious business in its third definition, where it defines envy as "the feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another," in which usage the word envy first pops up around 1500. It adds a fourth definition, one in which the word is used without "notions of malevolence," and has to do with the (a) "desire to equal another in achievement, or excellence; emulation," and (b) speaks to "a longing for the advantages enjoyed by another person." Aristotle, in The Rhetoric, writes of emulation as good envy, or envy ending in admiration and thus in the attempt to imitate the qualities one began by envying. Yet it must be added that envy doesn't generally work this way. Little is good about envy, except shaking it off, which, as any of us who have felt it deeply knows, is not so easily done.

 

Both the OED and Webster's definitions are inattentive to the crucial distinction between envy and jealousy. Most people, failing to pick up the useful distinction, mistakenly use the two words interchangeably. I suspect people did not always do so. H. W. Fowler, in his splendid Modern English Usage of 1926, carries no entry on either word, suggesting that formerly there was no confusion. Bryan A. Garner, in his 1998 Dictionary of Modern American Usage, says that "the careful writer distinguishes between these terms," but does not himself do so sufficiently. He writes that "jealousy is properly restricted to contexts involving affairs of the heart, envy is used more broadly of resentful contemplation of a more fortunate person."

 

With the deep pedantic delight one takes in trumping a recognized usage expert, it pleases me to say, "Not quite so." The real distinction is that one is jealous of what one has, envious of what other people have. Jealousy is not always pejorative; one can after all be jealous of one's dignity, civil rights, honor. Envy, except when used in the emulative sense mentioned by Aristotle, is always pejorative. If jealousy is, in clich