My Green-Eyed Monster.

It’s not easy being green.

I have recently come to the conclusion that Gabriel’s obsession with the toy in Phoebe’s hand is just human nature. It is not a character flaw, as I had feared. Or worse, an agenda on his part to torture and punish the poor girl. No, it is a dark emotion, which resides in all of us. And in his case, it is a part soon to be surgically removed by me, with or without anesthesia. Operation Envy Extraction.

Initially, I regarded his evil urges to yank and grab, every shred of plastic out of that child’s hands as a cruel gesture intended to inflict pain. But honestly, the boy is just jealous—insanely jealous. He wants what he wants. Don’t was all.

I don’t stem his greed with my actions. I am guilty of spending 99 cents on a Matchbox car to buy off compliance. I get a thrill feeling like a modern-day-Mommy-Warbucks each time I toss a dollar’s worth of treasure in the cart. It is a guilty pleasure and I am paying dearly for it.

I suppose my rage at his seemingly irrational want harkens back to my own childhood. Wanting in a land of disappointment really was “letting the terrorists win”. Divulging what you yearned for only served as fodder for manipulation and blackmail. Of course, I couldn’t help myself.

Being the eternal optimist, every year I dutifully folded back the pages of the Sears Christmas Wish Book and initialed the enticing product number with a perfect little “MB”. With each precision crease, I carefully sealed a futile hope that I would be transcended from this life by an object of desire.

One year I wished, hoped, and put my faith on the line by actually asking for a pair of Calvin Klein jeans. (Sears did not carry them.) It was all I wanted and I believed that my personal happiness and future would be secured by having that man’s name sewn on my ass.

On Christmas morning, I got one gift—a rather long, big, white cardboard from my nut-job of a biological mother. Santa suspiciously chose not to visit our house. I figured he was as scared of the owner as I was.

Upon inspection of the package, I thought, “Oh my god, they are so special, she didn’t want to fold them.” I opened the box and my dashed hopes were met with the freakish stare of two ceramic eyes. Eyes with excess of stage make-up and a sad little tear painted on the cheek.

I was cursed with a four-foot porcelain-headed harlequin clown. Okay, I guess, I could see how she confused denim with demon. The woman was delirious with joy from her evident generosity. And in that moment, solidified her reign as Queen of the Demented.

As any motivated teenager, who was fed on a steady diet of misguided encouragement, would do…I thrust my chin in the air and decided that I would just have to learn to love clowns. Such is the rationale formed in a sanity vacuum, where even light and sound made regular attempts to escape.

I spent six months of my life, in a manic tribute to clowns. I painted clowns. I drew clowns. I even formed them out of clay. To this day, there is a ceramic clown sculpture in my parent’s house from my sad clown period.

It is safe to say that the only thing worse than actually loving clowns, is faking it. And it is a pretty sick situation when you’ve exceeded clown-worship on the crazy-continuum. Thankfully, insincerity lacks endurance, and I abandoned my pursuit for more heartfelt endeavors. Like becoming an expert at shoplifting.

As I delve into the fruitless task of trying to reengineer a preschooler’s human nature, I have to wonder if there isn’t something to be gained from the clown affair. Desire makes us do crazy things. From people to Play-doh, our desires turn us into lust-thirsty lunatics. But it also inspires ambition, innovation, and in my case, hideous home décor.

Maybe wanting has its merits. Hell knows I want Gabriel to stop abusing his sister. I guess this is the point at which I need to enlist my imagination. I either need to want him to slap the girl or more creatively, I can try to sculpt a relationship that can endure this period of temptation and impulse.

We can put it right next to the clown doing a split, on the back of the toilet in the downstairs bathroom.