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1/27/1999 Of Envy, Sympathy, and Regret3:10 p.m. I'm at Border's cafe, sipping a hazelnut hot cocoa ("January's Drink Feature!") after an enjoyable lunch with Liz at Chevys. I am footloose and child-free--Stephanie is home with the twins. Since I have so much work to do, I decided to take few hours this afternoon as my mental health time, instead of going out tonight as I usually do on Weds. evenings. It feels good to be on my own once in a while. When I visit Borders during the day with the boys, I always look enviously at the people in the cafe--students, retired people, salesmen in between calls--and I think how nice it must be to take a few minutes in the middle of the day to sip a hot drink and browse through a book or magazine. And now here I am, and it is nice! Liz and I were trying to remember the last time we had seen each other, and we finally determined that it was late October. It's really a shame we let so much time elapse between visits, considering all those years we lived hundreds of miles away from each other and now we are less than ten miles apart. Can you envy someone and pity them at the same time? Because jealousy and sympathy are often mixed up together in my love for Liz. I envy her prestigious job, her beautiful home, her banker husband's big income. But I pity her because she has had serious health problems to overcome, her husband has a two hour commute and doesn't get home until after 8:30 p.m., and her little boy has been in day care since he was twelve weeks old. Liz often speaks about the conflicts she has had with her sister-in-law, an attachment parenting zealot, who is outspoken in her belief that mothers should stay home with their young children. I listen to her complaints and nod sympathetically, but in my heart I agree with the SIL. The biggest regret of my life is that I returned to work when Daniel was six months old. Even though he went to my aunt's day care (so he was with family), I feel that we were both cheated of something precious. I missed out on so much over the next two years of his life. And then the twins came along, and although I had him home with me again, I had to be so focused on them, again he missed out. I wonder how things might have been different if I had been able to stay home with him.
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