When a New Envy Rises

I thought I was done with it. Done with the surge of jealousy, the searing resentment that would boil whenever I saw a pregnant woman at the grocery store, or the doctor’s office, or anywhere (everywhere). I envied her seeming not-knowing, her innocence of all the terrible ways that a blissful pregnancy could end.

The jealousy was one of many facets of that wretched new normal that everyone in the babyloss and grief communities is always talking about. Things are not as they once were, and we can never turn back.

But now I’m twenty-six months out from our first child’s stillbirth, two years and two months, and our rainbow is a happy sixteen month old who fills my life with a light so beautiful that my heart can hardly bear it.

And there has been healing, too. I can pass pregnant women in the grocery aisles and wish them well, hoping that I never meet them in our local babyloss support group. I see families cherishing tiny newborns and I no longer scowl at them, coveting what they have, what had almost been mine with our daughter who died before she breathed.

Two years and two months in this life after stillbirth is what it takes to leave the jealousy behind. Two years and two months, and the envy no longer surges.

Or does it?

Today I'm writing  over at Still Standing Magazine.

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