How to manage jealousy?
“To be human means to feel inferior.” — Alfred Adler, 1933
One of the worst parts of struggling with infertility is the horrible jealousy which creeps upon you constantly. Given most of the world’s population over the age of 30 has kids, everything is a trigger. You are sitting in a plane, and the guy next to you spends the whole flight time looking at pictures of his kids. Trigger. You are going down the tube thinking you just had a pretty nice day and cross a pregnant woman. Trigger. People are pregnant for a very long time, and babies are everywhere.
In psychology, this is sometimes called the “new mindset” effect — you buy a new car and suddenly the world seems full of that particular model. With infertility, the saddest thing is that it deprives you from being fully happy when you hear a close one’s good news. When my closest cousin told me she was pregnant, I was jealous — as she was not married I thought I might have a few years’ headway. A friend who doesn’t know about our struggles sends me a picture of their newborn daughter with a nice message: “Hi Soleine, we are going for a stroll with our little Louise in the Tuileries gardens, such bliss”. The fear of being the old spinster with no kids creeps up on me. Even when a close friend tells me she had a traumatic miscarriage at 3 months, I am jealous, as that meant she was pregnant. And I feel awful about it.
I’ve become hypersensitive to words. In The Economist magazine, I’ve always liked reading the Obituary, as humans have such interesting lives. Now, I’ve gained the habit of quickly scanning it before even reading it to see how quickly they mention the deceased person’s family and to deduce at what age they conceived offspring. Given that most people do have children — the world population is increasing, after all — I am often jealous to see a mention of their descendants. Why do I care? I guess because reading about other people’s children makes me think my death would be less sad (and thus my life not as valuable) if I died now.
What can be done about this? Bob Marley tells me to “Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy”. B. C. Forbes, who founded the eponymous journal, called jealousy a “mental cancer”. How can I get rid of this terrible jealousy?
· Recognize that jealousy is ugly, but it’s normal.
Fairness is routed extremely deeply in human beings’ psyche (for more on this, read: The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Kate Pickett). For 90 % of our existence as human beings we lived, almost exclusively, in highly egalitarian societies. Infertility is extremely unfair, so it leads to jealousy. Jealousy is a very human emotion — in fact the first mention of the word “sin” in the Bible describes Cain killing his brother Abel out of jealousy, because God preferred Abel’s offering to his own.
Harold Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, who lost a son at a young age, wrote: “Jealousy is almost as inevitable a part of being hurt by life as are guilt and anger. How can the injured person not feel jealous of people who may not deserve better, but have received better? How can the widow not be jealous of even her closest friends who still have a husband to go home to? How should the woman whose doctor has told her she will never be able to bear children react when her sister-in-law confides to her that something may have gone wrong and she may be pregnant a fourth time?” If you need to cry because you are jealous, cry, and don’t feel bad about it. You are just being human.
· Turn your energy to something else, on which you have control. When I learned my best friend was pregnant, I called a foster house to know what were the conditions to become foster parents. I decided to practice harder at the guitar. Find other ways to make your life rich and make progress on your other life goals.
· Identify others’ crosses. In France, we have an expression “Chacun sa croix”: Everyone has their own cross of suffering. It’s important to acknowledge what problems you don’t have, which some of your friends with kids may be facing, so you can still feel empathy for them. One of my best friends has a cute, healthy baby — but she also has sick parents and her company is going through major restructuring. Harold Kushner, mentioned above, also writes of a Chinese tale about a woman whose only son died. In her grief, she went to a holy man and said, “What prayers, what magical incantations do you have to bring my son back to life?” He responded, “Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to drive the sorrow out of your life.” The woman set off at once in search of that magical mustard. But she only encountered homes who had some form of sorrow, and decided to help these families instead. As Kushner writes “Perhaps that is the only cure for jealousy, to realize that the people we resent and envy for having what we lack, probably have wounds and scars of their own”.
