Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Insight on jealousy

I hope my friend doesn't mind I post this...but more often than not she says just the right thing and I think other women might need to hear it too.

Eh, I think you look fine in green. :-) Seriously, I
don't know how you could manage not to feel some of
that jealousy. You know, this may sound totally
bizarre to you, but I guess just from empathizing with
you since you lost Alex, I'm uncomfortable around
pregnant women. It's just that I now see things a bit
differently and can't get into all that happy talk --
partly because it seems so unfair that some women can
breeze through all this so easily while you went
through hell, and partly because I now have this view
of the state of pregnancy as a truly precarious one,
in which the afflicted are so often oblivious. It's
like watching an idiot on a tightrope; I mean, I
really hope she gets to the other side okay, but I
just can't stay and watch as she babbles, oblivious to
the danger. So if even people who love you and
remember Alex daily but who have never been anywhere
like where you've been now view pregnancy and
motherhood differently, how in the world could you
expect yourself to be a Pollyanna about everything?
If your FRIENDS' perspectives have changed, why would
you expect that YOURS would stay the same?

5 comments:

cat said...

Wow that is eloquent and right on the money. Watching other women who are pg still makes me uncomfortable. Probably because I know how far they can fall.

Sending you some love.

SWH said...

I'm almost paralizingly jealous and angry these days towards pg women. And I wanted to add to R, and you, that I find myself feeling slightly let down when I hear that everything is Ok after another friends/coworkers birth. My issues with waiting to hear about the next two birth stories (one tomorrow- scheduled c-section, and another any day now) its anxiety about hearing that everything is ok. I can't believe i'm about to write this... but right now i feel like i would feel relief if i heard someone had a bad outcome... and when i try to define bad outcome it seems to involve dead babies...

kate said...

Wow, what a great friend you have! That is awesome! (the support, that is, not the jealousy LOL)

SWH said...

Ok I thought about it a little more... and i think i mostly just want to have the whole situation not exist (re. other people's pgs and births)... I just want it to go away. And yes i know that's not really logical. But my head isn't too logical these days.

Julian's Mom said...

I'm so glad you have a friend like that. She sounds a lot like a really good friend that I've made since Julian died. Everyone should have at least one friend who isn't afraid to tell you things like that.

As for Sarah's comments, Sarah, I don't think you're crazy. I often feel that way. I wish no one had to suffer the kind of losses we've had. But sometimes I think that the only way the world and the people around us would "get it" is if it were more visible and talked about, and if I didn't feel like the only one in my world whose baby died, which just makes me feel like others see me as a freak, instead of making them understand that babies do, indeed, die, that it happens more often than most people think, and that it could happen to anyone.

Mom

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