Jealousy is an emotion we have all encountered over the years, and the loss of our baby can invite this feeling into our lives by the bucketload. Jealous of pregnancy announcements, birth announcements, jealous of those around us with heaving bumps and arms laden with tiny babies, jealous of how easy it is for everyone else and their smooth and painless transition into motherhood. It is such an all-consuming and downright ugly feeling that it inevitably comes hand in hand with shame, and it is a feeling that we would love to rid ourselves of entirely, or at least relieve a little where possible. In this chapter, I’m going to explore where this jealousy comes from and then look at how to work on eliminating it.
Firstly, let’s not feel shameful of our jealous feelings. By noting them, you are already taking steps to confront and change your way of thinking and that is always a commendable thing. By being proactive, you are honouring your baby in yet another way. You are embracing their short life by exploring ways to change your thoughts and feelings for the greater good.
And you are certainly not alone. Jealousy is everywhere in our world, and of course this includes the emotional minefield of the baby loss world, where it is magnified among the emotional blow out of such an intense trauma. Every single human on earth knows jealousy well, whether experiencing the repercussions from someone else who feels jealous or living with the uncomfortable feeling ourselves. ‘How many times have you felt jealous?’ is an impossible question to answer. Even if as adults we haven’t suffered with strong jealousy, there are countless times we experienced it growing up and there are always future opportunities for it to arise, even in the most subtle of ways. And just as we love and grieve with such a deep and strong intensity when our baby dies, we also experience heightened ‘negative’ emotions such as jealousy. It is part and parcel of the animalistic continuance that our baby’s presence brought with it. Their brief life seasoned your own with lashings of emotions, and sometimes they are just harder to navigate than others.
Whether we have lost a baby or not, we know jealousy. When we have lost a baby, we just know it better.
You can begin by realising it not shameful to admit your jealousy, it is in fact rather honourable that you are beginning the journey of relieving yourself of its poisonous burden, all while you keep your baby in your heart.
The first thing I always consider is that jealousy, although a valid and real emotion, is a wasted and pointless sentiment. By feeling jealous of someone else’s happiness or success, it doesn’t make you feel better and it doesn’t stop them feeling happy or being successful. In that sense it is a double loss – you feel worse, they are still happy. Once you realise how empty and worthless the mental pain of jealousy is, you can make a rational and firm commitment to dispose of it.
So why do we feel jealous? Well, simply put, we feel jealous when we feel like our own needs are not met. This feeling comes from our deep-rooted ‘self-cherishing’, the mentality that all humans possess that puts themselves as their number one priority. We don’t need to be ashamed to admit that we have this mindset – we all do, it is our greatest flaw as humans, and it leads to all our subsequent feelings of anger, attachment, jealousy, etc. It is the mindset that subsequently leads humans into division, war and other disastrous situations.
To give an example of this mentality, we can use an analogy: imagine you are walking down your street and you notice that all the houses have smashed windows. Our mind instantly thinks, Oh wow, I hope MY house hasn’t had its windows smashed. While of course we may feel natural compassion for our friends and neighbours, we are ultimately relieved when we discover that our house is OK. Now, imagine that you are told that only one house on your street has been broken into – our self-cherishing leaps in again and says, I hope it’s not MY house! Self-cherishing is the mind that values my things greater than it values others’, whether that be my house, my car, my family, my idea, my religion or my country. It is not to be confused with selfishness, but is rather a naturally arising mindset that promotes strong attachment to ‘me, my, mine’.
Jealousy arises from this self-cherishing, it is a feeling that says, My wish not to suffer is more important than your happiness. When we read a pregnancy announcement and retreat into jealousy, we are thinking about our pain rather than the other person’s happiness. In that sense, we are putting our own pain first. We have reverted to our common human flaw that I am more important than you, my feelings are more important than yours. But remember, no self-judgment, no shame. Jealous feelings are entirely natural when your baby dies and other babies live. There is inevitably the feeling that after so much raw pain we have to protect our own heart, and I am not suggesting anyone denies themselves that privilege – I would certainly never suggest you beat yourself up for feeling that way.
Just like you, my life is not devoid of jealousy. I am a human, one who has suffered the loss of her child shortly after he was born and two further losses, and has lived with the subsequent sting of pregnancy and birth announcements. I would like to share with you a personal moment when I felt the rages of jealousy.
I had just suffered my second miscarriage following the sudden death of my newborn son and we were in the run up to his first birthday and anniversary of his death. I was heartbroken and losing hope when a close friend of mine announced – quite out of the blue – that she was expecting a baby. She sent me a beautiful and well-considered text and I’ve no doubt she was aware that the news would bring with it a level of pain for me. But despite knowing all that, I read the message and my chest burned. I felt angry, I felt incredibly jealous, and I went straight to bed and cried a river. My mind said, Why can she have a baby so easily but I can’t?! In that moment my pain was more important than the fact that my friend had just discovered that she was about to become a mother and was overjoyed at such a life-changing moment. I instantly thought, I want that! rather than, SHE is deserving of that happiness.
Grief is complicated and you must allow yourself to engage in self-care and be gentle on your heart, but we must also remember that we are just one single person while others are countless, and everyone around us deserves happiness. Yes, we wish with all our hearts that our own baby had this chance at life, of course we do, but they didn’t, their chance at life has sadly been and gone. In shunning another baby in the wish for our own to be revived we are simply wishing for the impossible, and causing ourselves huge pain in the meantime. It doesn’t mean we don’t find these situations painful and want to crawl into a corner and lick our wounds, but it also means that we can accept that the happiness of others is just as important as the respect we deserve for our own grief.
I realised eventually that I didn’t want my friend – or anyone – to feel guilty for their happiness. I didn’t want her pregnancy and motherhood to be tainted by my personal pain. She was happy and why shouldn’t she be? I remembered the feeling from my first carefree pregnancy and what a wonderful gift it was for her to experience and rejoice in that. We can all draw from the memories our babies gifted us. Even the briefest of pregnancies harvested a little life so precious and celebrated, our babies taught us what an incredible honour it is to be in that position and so we can recognise the honour of that in someone else too.
You do not need to suppress the feeling of jealousy, you do not need to torture yourself for it. You can simply notice its arrival, challenge why you feel that way, and slowly overcome it.
Another point to contemplate is that we are all on our own journey. If your friend becomes pregnant, has that robbed you of your own chance? Absolutely not. Her – and anyone else’s – happiness is not related to yours in that sense. And so, when we really consider this, does it actually make any sense to not feel happy for her? Another healthy baby has an opportunity at life, and that doesn’t make or break your own chance at motherhood. The same goes for any situation, our lives are all dependent upon individual circumstances arising, and so we can celebrate the happiness of others as if it were a success of our own.
We can remember that another person feeling happy doesn’t mean that we can’t be happy. Nobody is capable of stealing your happiness.
When we are in the throes of loss it can feel as though happiness and suffering have been unevenly distributed, as though there is a limited currency to stretch among us all, and we are left poor. We see others rolling around, rich in happy coins, while we sit alone with our own meagre supply. When we see happiness in this way, we are forgetting that no one is stealing our coins, there is no set amount, there is no limit. It is possible for any of us to be rich this way, regardless of how much the other person next to us has. We may not be feeling such happiness in this present moment, but the future is yet to greet us. To be jealous of those around us who have the happiness we desire in the present moment is denying that future before it even has chance to reach out a hand. Others may have what we want right now, but one day it’s possible that we will have what they want.
Often when we feel jealous we discover that this feeling vanishes when we achieve our own happiness, and if this is the case then we can see that jealousy is simply dependent upon our own mind in that moment and therefore it is impermanent. One day here, one day not.
Just because you feel jealous today, doesn’t mean you will always feel this way. Our mind shifts and changes constantly and we can make the decision as to which direction we point it, after all it is our mind, we own it.
There are other countless things to consider. For example, a stranger who sees me pass by as I hold my baby daughter may look at me and feel jealous that they do not have a baby. But of course they don’t know my journey to this point. The fact is that we rarely know a person’s full background or history.
A few years ago, I stood in the shop queue, empty womb and broken heart, behind a heavily pregnant lady, and I looked at her as if she had the whole world. I thought, I want that. But of course everyone suffers in life, mentally, physically, emotionally. Was the woman in front of me happy? Who knows. Perhaps she faced redundancy from her job, no longer loved her partner or suffered from anxiety. It’s easy to compare suffering and feel as though ours is worse, and of course I can agree that baby loss is severely cruel, but suffering is suffering, and no one escapes it for a lifetime, no one. When I looked at her as if she had the whole world, there are others looking at me and thinking the same. We only have to turn on the news and witness the devastation that exists alongside us in this world to see that we – in our safe-roofed, cosy and warm, war-free, full-bellied worlds – are objects of jealousy too.
If we know of others around us in the loss community – or beyond – who are feeling jealous, then we should also know that this requires great compassion from us. Jealousy is so often hurled as an insult, and with it comes a huge amount of personal attack and negative insinuation. But if we all think about a moment when we have felt jealous, then we can easily realise just how ugly it feels. When we are jealous we are angry, ashamed and most likely comparing our personal value to the value of others. It is such a consuming emotion that it is quickly out of our control, and many crimes of passion have been committed by someone who feels jealous.
While it doesn’t always mean we are going to turn into a crazed murderer, jealousy can lead us to cut contact with friends and family and say and do tremendously hurtful and regretful things. There is never any good that comes from a feeling of jealousy, and it feels painful and poisonous. No one has ever said ‘I love feeling jealous, it’s so wonderful!’, and those around us who feel jealous are suffering great mental pain. When we do retaliate in jealousy, it feels good for a short time but it is quickly chased by feelings of shame and guilt – if we know how this feels, then we can realise that those around us suffering from jealousy do not require shaming and mocking, but actually they require great compassion to relieve them of such a terrible feeling.
It may take hours, days, weeks, years, to overcome such intense jealousy, but with practice and your baby close in your thoughts, it is possible. And the greatest things happen from those moments where you put it aside – you relieve yourself of the added and wasted suffering of jealousy at a time when you already feel the relentless grip of grief, and you celebrate your friends’ happiness. It’s not always easy, but as long as you have a mind it is possible.
And so when you feel the green-eyed monster creeping in, remember:
Jealousy is a natural feeling, no shame in that.
Jealousy is not a permanent feeling, you will not always feel this way.
It is a mindset that simply robs you of any happiness for others and therefore you can make a determination to ease or overcome it, with your baby in your heart.
Somebody else having a baby doesn’t steal your own chance of one day holding a living baby of your own.
Your baby taught you what an incredible honour it is to be pregnant, and how you wish for your baby to be forever celebrated. You can take this lesson they so kindly gifted you and pass it on to a fellow pregnant mother, in your baby’s memory.