Green-Eyed Monster Attack

I’m very happy for something that has come up for my ex, but I’m also struggling with just a bit of jealousy. Which makes me feel awful. How can I be jealous and begrudge the fact that something has finally gone right for him?

Here’s the deal. When we moved to this city in early 1997, he found a job working for, well, let me call it M Company. A couple of years later, and M Co. was swallowed up in some mergers, and X was out of a job. He found a new job with H Company. He worked at H Co. for five or six years, and then M Co. called and asked him to come back. They offered some enticements: day shift instead of second shift, big raise, etc. He took it. He’s been working at M Co. for a year, maybe two now, making around $15 an hour, maybe as much as $16 an hour. But a few months after he started on days, they stuck him back on second shift. (Bait-and-switch, anyone?)

So the other day, out of the blue, H Co. calls him. They want him to come back. As day shift graphic design supervisor (or something like that). At $60K per year. And they want to send him back to school to get a degree. And they are willing to switch him directly onto their insurance (no COBRA). And a bunch of other really nice considerations. He asks me if he should take it. DUH! What am I gonna say? “No, don’t double your salary and take a day shift job!”? Please.

So here’s where the green-eyed bit comes in. I’m happy for him. I truly am. I have always told him that he was underpaid and underappreciated. So for a guy with only a high school diploma to have two companies “fighting” over him and to be placed in management at double his current salary, that’s wonderful! It truly is.

But I am jealous. All these years, after he told me what a useless, lazy git I was, I’ve been earning more than he did. I’ve been managing my money better. I’ve worked for a lot of places and earned a lot of raises and perks and bennies. There’s no way I’m ever going to catch up with him, now. I have a BA in English, but it’s never parlayed into that $50K a year that the guidance counselors told me I’d make just on virtue of having a degree. I’m not quite at $40K right now, and I won’t be going much higher than that unless someone in this company retires or unless I move to a different company. There’s no companies fighting over me — I’m only an admin. They don’t send head-hunters out to find the crack admins. After all, being an admin is like being a housewife — “any trained monkey can do that.” I know it’s BS, you know it’s BS, but that’s the perception.

I keep telling myself it isn’t — shouldn’t be — a competition. But I have a highly competitive nature. AND, again, this is the guy who constantly cut me down and told me how worthless and incompetent I was. I suppose I’ve been harbouring a bit of smug self-satisfaction all these years, that for a lazy, incompetent female, I was earning more than he was. And now that’s gone, and I’m kind of sad about that. How horrible of me.