Some years ago, I had a patient I’ll call Amira. When she was twenty-seven years old, Amira was in a serious car accident – the car she was driving skidded into the central reservation on the M1 motorway. The accident left her physically uninjured but emotionally wrecked.
Two years after the accident, Amira was beginning to put her life back together, but finding it more and more difficult to tell her mother about her improving situation. ‘I can’t stand her “Masha’Allahs”,’ Amira told me. ‘Masha’Allah means “God has willed it”. My mother says it whenever anything good happens to me. She says it’s to ward off the “evil eye” – to protect me from people’s envy – and it’s driving me crazy.’
Amira described a conversation with her mother about the arrangements that she and her fiancé were making for their honeymoon. ‘I told her we had decided to go to Paris: “Masha’Allah.” I started to tell her about the hotel we’d chosen: “Masha’Allah.” I tried to tell her about our suite and our plans: “Masha’Allah, masha’Allah, masha’Allah” I felt like throwing my mobile out the window,’ Amira said. ‘My happiness isn’t only God’s will – it’s partly my accomplishment.’
It seemed to me that Amira’s mother’s desire to protect her daughter from other people’s envy was rooted in her own feelings of envy. Amira was at first surprised by this idea. But as she thought about it, it became clear that her mother was probably missing an earlier time. Amira’s mother had once told her that one of the happiest times in her life was during her first year of marriage, when she and Amira’s father had lived in France. ‘It can’t be easy for her,’ Amira admitted. ‘I’m looking forward to a marriage and children, and she’s a widow, looking back.’ Later, Amira wondered if she had been insensitive, or had perhaps unwittingly tried to make her mother jealous.
We often envy our children their treasures – growing physical and mental strength, liveliness, joy, material comforts. But above all else, we envy our children their potential. Robert B., a fifty-five-year-old civil servant, once described to me a dream he’d had: ‘I’m on a mountain. My dead grandparents are at the very top, above the clouds. They’re resting in a small wooden hut, waiting for my parents who are just below the summit. I’m further down the mountain from my parents. My children are at the foot of the mountain and have just left our base camp. I hide behind a rock and my children pass me. When I step back on to the path and see them high above me, I feel euphoric.’
Among other things, Robert’s dream depicts his view of life’s expedition from birth to death, from cradle (base camp) to grave (a small wooden hut). It also represents his unconscious wish to step out of time, to reverse places with his children, so that he might have an even longer future stretching out before him than they do.
For the most part, the envy I’m describing is unconscious: furtive, resistant to investigation or corroboration. We glimpse it in our dreams, but also in our slips and blunders. A mother I know, raised in poverty, was thrilled to buy her daughter a wool suit at Prada but, within hours, had accidentally put the skirt in the washing machine, ruining it. Envy often comes disguised in a correction – a father deflates his enthusiastic child with words like ‘cheeky’ or ‘precocious’ a mother complains that her child is ungrateful: ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ ‘I never had a such-and-such like this.’ When we envy our children we deceive ourselves – we think too little of them and too well of ourselves.
You don’t have to be a parent to feel this particular envy. A sports coach can envy his athlete, a teacher can envy his student, and – it would be unfair not to include this – a psychoanalyst can envy his patient. Sometimes our patients are younger, brighter and financially more successful than we are. And it is not all that unusual that a psychoanalyst can help a patient solve a problem that the psychoanalyst himself has been struggling with unsuccessfully in his own life. Any ‘parent’ can get snagged by this particular form of envy.
The question is this: can we unhook ourselves by reaching an acceptance of ourselves and our place in time, so that we can enjoy our child’s pleasures and successes? For at its furthest extreme, envying one’s child is a great psychological misfortune, and we stand to lose both our mental equilibrium and our child.
Ten years ago, Stanley P., a seventy-seven-year-old widower and father of four, was referred to me by his family doctor. His activities were increasingly restricted – in this way, I soon saw, he avoided feeling envious of others. He did not travel and would socialise only with those for whom he felt contempt – the people he hired to do odd jobs, for example. He was uncomfortable with his children. He complained to each child about the others – about their husbands and wives, the birthday gifts they had given him, or the frequency of their telephone calls. Stanley’s behaviour had caused his children gradually to withdraw from his life – and this only confirmed his sense of their selfishness.
One day Stanley described a visit from his daughter, who used to bring her husband and children to see him several times a year, but now came on her own, at most once a year. As he told me about saying goodbye to her, holding her hand in an airport cafe, Stanley became tearful. He recalled a time when she was small, and he’d stood just outside her bedroom door as she tried to read The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle to her teddy bear. But this memory, and his feelings of tender sadness, soon gave way to a list of grievances – about the brevity of her visit, the cheapness of her parting gift. And she was lost to him again. What remained of his feelings of love for his child stood little chance against the grand narrative that his envy had written.