The Forbidden Emotion
What’s parched and green and spiky all over?
Not green like a landscape. ‘
Green as nausea.
Green as arsenic.
Green with ENVY.
Some will make distinctions between envy and jealousy. For my purposes here, they’re interchangeable. Two big, bold feelings, equally forbidden in polite society.
I know, I know, my readership is open-minded, intelligent, and compassionate. You don’t HAVE forbidden emotions — either because nothing is forbidden or because you’re too cool to feel something as ugly as jealousy.
But track your body as the subject gets prickly, and just notice what’s coiled there in defense of jealousy.
I have a lot of very wise teachers who tell me that jealousy is just a friendly emotion pointing you in the directions of your own dreams and desires. You feel a pang of jealousy when you see your friend’s success? It just shows that you value what she has. Good! Go get it.
And you know, that’s fine. There’s certainly truth to it. Jealousy DOES point us towards what’s precious to us. Towards what we want. But this is small scale jealousy. You haven’t really felt jealous until the direction you’re pointed in is something you absolutely can not have. Grief and jealousy together are old friends and a very potent mix.
I have a friend whose mom died, and then her dog died. “Oh great.” She said, “I’ve been jealous of everyone who has a mom for a decade, now I’ve got to be jealous of everyone who has a dog, too?” Imagine that. She values her mom. She values her dog. They’re both dead. They aren’t ever coming back. Track if your impulse is to tell her she can get a new dog, or to turn her towards happy memories with her mother. Just notice. How close can you get to her reality when she’s jealous?
A birth announcement arrives at the home of bereaved parents. The mourning mother opens it and it brings her to her knees. Every viscous judgment she’s ever had about this other mother rises to the surface and she wants to scream, “WHY HER AND NOT ME!?” Would you take her in your arms and let her rage, or would you do as her husband does and say, “I don’t understand why you can’t be happy for them. They’re our best friends!”
A couple who is on their 4th round of IVF with no baby in sight decides to take a break from Christmas this year as their siblings are all showing up with bulging bellies or babes in arms. Do you say, Bon voyage! And send them a gift for their trip? Or do you get really hurt and offended that they won’t show up to the gathering.
A mom who just had a miscarriage plays dodge-the-baby-carriage in the aisles of the grocery store.
A woman who always wanted to be a mother but is turning 42 next week with no suitable partner in sight won’t enter the baby aisle at target because of how she’ll feel towards the moms she knows she’ll find there.
A baby-lost mom shoots daggers at the happy, glowing pregnant woman across the room and wishes her baby would die too.
The mom of a medically complex child wants to flip a table when she has to hear about your insignificant troubles.
I, when I first entered grief space, was wildly jealous of moms who found out their babies were sick in the first trimester. Lucky bitches. They didn’t have to go to Colorado. They got to have an abortion and I had to kill my baby.
My friend, who had a long infertility journey, was jealous of me even after my loss because I had a baby in arms and she did not.
I debated long and hard whether I was jealous of a friend whose husband had a health catastrophe but whose baby was healthy. My husband was healthy and my baby was dead. I didn’t quite know how to parse that one.
I sometimes envy parents of medically complex children because they get to actually know and hold and love their baby earthside and I do not — even as I made this decision myself and would make it again a million times if I had to.
It’s a very, very good thing The Evil Eye isn’t real, because I’d have wielded it if I were magic.
Check your body again for how all this makes you feel. Soft and open with relief because you’re not alone? Contracted and nauseated because jealousy is a sin? Just notice
Jealousy is a shadow-emotion of the darkest, most forbidden kind. It is a universal pain-point in grief space, especially babyloss space. And yet, I’ve never seen ANYTHING directed at soothing and holding jealousy in particular, in grief space or anywhere.
So I made one myself.
I’m hosting a seminar tomorrow, Tuesday Nov 21 at 10:30 am EST (GMT-5)
And please, please send this to your friends if you know they’re hurting from infertility, aging out of motherhood, baby-loss, miscarriage, or any other circumstances that might wake their jealousy and make the holidays tricky. That is one thing you can do for them in the discomfort of jealousy. The other thing you can do is give them a hug if they’ll take it, and tell them you love them, no matter what they’re feeling in any given moment.