Tag: Jealousy

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Jealousy, by Betsy

Searching my soul I can say that at this point in my life I do not feel any jealousy. It’s hard to be jealous when at the same time I am happy, and at peace, and content. It has not always been that way, however.

From day one I felt like I was in a competition with my brother 1 and 1/2 years older than I.

He was the first-born, he was the ever important son, and, it turned out, the only son in the family. My brother, Whitford, growing up was allowed to go here and there as he pleased. While I, being a girl, had nowhere near the freedom he enjoyed. My jealousy was tempered however by the fact that Whit was assigned by my mother to look after me in certain situations like walking to school, or on the playground, or in the halls of our high school. I loved having an older brother I knew would be there for me if needed. I don’t remember ever being in a situation where I needed him to come to my rescue. But it was very comforting to know help was available if I needed it. In spite of all that I was jealous of his relative freedom, and more important, the abundance of love I was convinced he received for free and that I had to earn. Whether this feeling was justified or not, I am not sure. I think that my sense that I had to earn what he got for just being had to do with order of birth in the family and perhaps our gender difference.

I do not fault my parents for the difference that I sensed. I have written about the compatibility that my father and I had. He and my brother did not enjoy that same bond. Why, I don’t know.

My brother was not excluded. We often did things as a family. But when Dad and I went off on an adventure, Whit simply was not interested.

Sibling jealousy, it seems to me, is a very common family dynamic. I was not jealous of my sister, however. Perhaps I have had twinges of envy in some of my lower moments of adulthood, but I do not remember any jealousy as a youngster. That is probably due to the fact that she is 8 years younger than I. Because of the age difference, I was HER caretaker often being assigned baby sitting duties in her younger years. She was not an easy child to manage either, and I didn’t have much power over her. She could carry on and scream louder than anyone I had ever come across. Alas, ‘though, that was childhood. She grew up to be a beautiful person and she is still that today.

Another object of jealousy I remember was not directed toward any specific person in my life or even a person I was acquainted with. When I began to wake up and become aware of my true sexuality and at the same time married to Bill, when we were out in public places I would always notice when two women were together. I could usually tell by the way they looked at each other or touched—as if I had a super sensitive antenna—I could tell if they were in a lesbian relationship. I can remember this happening a couple of times. I felt jealous of the women and what they had together. This, needless to say, was during the period when my marriage began to fail.

Now, in the autumn of my life (it’s really winter, isn’t it), my jealousy is directed toward simple things like young people who don’t have an aching back, hips, knees, and shoulders, have endless energy to do all the things I still want to do.

And last but not least, there are those moments when I wish I could be as good a storyteller and as good a writer as many of you in this room. But I’m not so sure that what I feel here is jealousy. I’m inclined to regard my feeling in this case as pure, unadulterated admiration.

© 18 April 2016

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.

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Jealousy by Gillian

The first part of this story will be a boring repeat for those who have been in this group for a while, in fact I am just pulling small parts from other writings, so I’ll try to keep it short. It returns – no surprise – to my childhood and the subsequent angst of my inner child.

My mother taught the younger children in one room of the local two-room school. Over time my dad and I heard every struggle, every humorous incident, every cute utterance involving every child passing through my mother’s classroom. When she wasn’t talking about them, she was studying new methods to teach them, or devising educational games for them to play.

They were her life.

She taught me, too, for the first few years of my school life.

Slowly it came to me, though, that I was never one of those she told my father about with such gusto, or pathos, or humor. Why? Wasn’t I as interesting or funny or sad as all the rest of them? Why wasn’t I her most important child?

The ugly green-eyed monster began to raise it’s ugly head.

In 1955, I had Asian flu. I stayed home in bed and my mother promised to check up on me at lunchtime, her school being just a five-minute walk from our house.

My day proceeded through an elevated-temperature induced haze, but I was sufficiently conscious to look forward to my mother’s arrival; a cool loving hand on my sweating brow. Lunchtime came and went and I knew she had forgotten me. Me. Her own daughter. Her own sick-in-bed daughter. All those other bloody kids had come between us. They were all she had room for in her mind or her heart. But it should have been me. I should be the one who filled her heart. Not them. I sobbed in emptiness and anger.

The green-eyed monster proudly puffed himself up.

A few years later, my aunt told me that my parents had had two children who lived and died before I was born. They died of meningitis at the ages of two and three. Slowly, as I came to grips with this new knowledge, it began to throw a little murky light on my parents’ emotions, especially my mother’s.

However, understanding intellectually that my mother could not afford to be as close to me as I wanted, needed, her to be, for fear of leaving herself vulnerable to more unbearable pain, was one thing. Watching her showering other, safer, children with that love I craved, was quite another. Why, why, why? screamed inside my head.

Still more subliminally, always craving to be number one, I lived in constant competition with two dead children; not a competition I was ever going to win.

Over the years, the emptiness, receded but never disappeared. The green-eyed monster dozed with one eye open so as not to miss an opportunity.

After my mother died I found a few old faded black and white photos at the bottom of a drawer; two smiling happy children, two smiling happy parents. I stared at my grinning father wheeling the two toddlers in his wheelbarrow. Why had I never seen him with a broad grin like that? Why had I never managed to bring him such joy? Why them and not me? Why was I never number one?

In 1987, I entered into a seriously committed relationship with my Beautiful Betsy, who was, as a mother should be, already in a seriously committed relationship with her children. The green eyes opened wide. The monster stirred and smiled a sly smile. Time to wake up! He bided his time and at first all was fine. But slowly those old crazy feelings began to take shape. She loves them more than me began the whispers, eventually becoming screams, in my head. Oh, intellectually I knew, of course, that the love for a child is completely different from the love of a partner, and in any case love is not a finite commodity, there is enough and more to go round, but that did nothing to still the screams. If we are married, which we always considered ourselves to be, regardless of laws, then I am supposed to be number one. Aren’t I? Aren’t I?

Betsy has what I believe to be a closer than average relationship with her daughters, and of course I wouldn’t wish it any other way. However, it made for a bad juxtaposition of energies; the yin and the yang. But the last thing I wanted was to cause pain to Betsy and those she loved, and most of all, I freely admit, I did not want to create further pain for myself. I had to kill the monster. Thus began a quest for spiritual enlightenment which still continues today. Through it I have discovered a level of deep peace which I never knew before. If I ever knew such peace of the soul existed, it somehow seemed reserved for a lone monk sitting cross-legged on a mountain top, not for me. I never dreamed it could and would exist for me. And if I sound rather like a born-again, that is because I am. Not through religion: not through sudden belief in another being, but a new belief in myself and my world and everyone and everything in it. I am at peace with the messy past, the glorious present, and the future, whatever it may bring.

But I did not succeed in cutting off that monster’s head; I merely shot a tranquilizer dart.

I know that I must always remain alert for the re-emergence of those evil green eyes.

© April 2016

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Jealousy, by Will Stanton

I’m not sure that I ever have
experienced real jealousy in my whole life. 
Based upon the correct definition of the concept, jealousy requires a
degree of bitterness and covetousness to the point that the jealous person
would be content to take away from someone else whatever he desires to
take.  Apparently, I wasn’t born nasty
enough to harbor such feelings.
 
Envy is a different matter, a
feeling that is not healthful, yet, at the same time, is not so potentially
harmful as jealousy.  One can envy the
positive attributes that someone is born with or acquires, but without wishing
to deprive the fortunate person from his attributes.
I, like most people, have
fallen prey to envy.  This is especially
true when I encounter someone who is quite healthy, young, attractive,
athletic, and who has accomplished feats not granted to me.  I certainly have envied the superlative
concert pianists their hands and skills, lamenting that I was given “feet for
hands.”  Yet, I would rather address a much
lighter topic, one that is rather more unusual; and that is being able to
travel the world and learn from it.
I benefited greatly from my
two trips to Europe, one when I was a child, and one when I was a young
adult.  Unfortunately, I have not been back,
yet those two experiences broadened my mind and provided me with the insight to
view people and events more realistically than many people do who stay mired in
their limited experiences.  Mark Twain is
famous for saying (and I agree with him), “Travel is fatal to prejudice,
bigotry, and narrow-mindedness; and many of our people need it sorely on these
accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable
views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner
of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
So, how advantageous it would
be for a person to not only have the opportunity to travel extensively
throughout the world, but, also, to begin doing so very young.  Well, I know of two such little boys, Nathan
and Seamus. 
Nathan
Seamus
Some time ago watching Public
Television, I stumbled upon an informative and charming program called “Travel
with Kids.”  It features a young couple,
Jeremy and Carrie, who have traveled the world together for twenty years, not
staying in fancy hotels, but, instead, sometimes backpacking and exploring
areas off the beaten path and away from most touristy locales.  Having their first baby, Nathan, did not
prevent their continuing their travels, nor did the birth of their second son
Seamus.  Instead, they have turned their
love of travel into a profitable travel program and an opportunity to provide
their little boys with wondrous sights of diverse peoples and cultures.
Those bright little kids have,
for eight years, been adsorbing experiences and knowledge like sponges.  Their parents take them to fascinating
museums, many of them interactive, where they can explore for themselves local
flora and fauna.  They interact with
local guides and townspeople, learning about history, arts and crafts, language,
and traditions.  They taste regional
cuisine, learn to try and enjoy dishes new and different to them.  Continually excited by their adventures, they
often reveal a surprising degree of acquired knowledge by speaking to the
camera, explaining quite well what they have learned.
And, the extent of their
travels and experiences is amazing. 
Apparently, they have traveled through South Korea, Venice, the
Caribbean, Victoria Falls, Naples, Thailand, South Africa, Latin America, South
Pacific, Ireland, France, Vietnam, England, Scotland, Bahamas, Belize, Greece,
Kenya, China, Jamaica, Egypt, Yucatan, Spain, Mexico, Fiji, French Polynesia,
Curacao, Tahiti, and Bora Bora.  I might
have missed some. 
I never have quite figured out
how this family crams so much travel into annual schedules that must, somehow,
include schooling for the two boys.  Yet,
I must say that what they have learned in their travels is an astonishing
supplement to their formal schooling. 
Yes, I also must say that I rather envy their wonderful opportunities
provided by their parents.
You recall the Mark Twain’s
quotation I mentioned before.  These two
kids must be the most broadminded kids in the world.  And, what a dramatic contrast to the
school-teacher I met who said something like, “I’m not interested in
traveling.  Everything in America is
bigger and better than anywhere else.”  I
just can imagine how this woman thinks about anything outside her own tiny
experience.  I also can imagine how she
votes, which is typical of the terrible social and political problems plaguing
our poor nation.
So, Nathan and Seamus, I hope
your rare and wonderful opportunity to travel so extensively contributes to
your becoming wise and empathetic adults. 
May your insight and wisdom help you both to make positive contributions
to our world.
© 16 Dec 2015 
About
the Author 

I have had a life-long fascination with
people and their life stories.  I also
realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or
fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual
ones.  Since I joined this Story Time
group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group.  I do put some thought and effort into my
stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.