When I was seven years old and my friend Ashley got a pair of pink-framed glasses, with glitter in the handles, I went home, pulled my parents’ toolbox out from under the hoover, and set about making my own pair with a small roll of wire, electrical tape, and some red garden twine.
I have never been awfully good with envy. Bicycles, garden slides, orthodontic braces , electric curtains ... I often feel that I have spent my life yearning. Yearning for things that few people in their right mind would ever want. Yearning for things that nobody else seems as obsessed by. Yearning for things that, once realised, prove to be either cataclysmically painful or a total waste of time. If someone I love has something I’d love, it can feel almost impossible to bear.
So, it will come as less than absolutely no surprise to hear that I am struggling with my friends getting pregnant. Oh, I know. I KNOW. I am speaking here from a position of such jaw-aching privilege that it seems almost obscene to mention it. Because I already have a child. A child who, often, seems the most magical pulse of electricity running through the very blood in my veins. He is the contraction that keeps my heart beating.
And yet, when a friend shows me the scan of her recently inhabited uterus, or types those magical, life-changing words into WhatsApp, there is still a part of me that feels their happiness like a sting. I am happy for them, I have often longed for this on their part, I am thrilled to know that they are joining me in this strange, Sisyphean task we call parenting. But someone else’s pregnancy will always throw into high contrast my own position. And I am not, nor am I soon likely to be, pregnant.
I am not asking for sympathy here. Nor am I asking you to agree with me. I am simply trying to point out that some envy cannot be solved as simply as getting what we want. Not all yearning is quashed by having something of your own. Not all jealousy is rational or reasonable or even fair. But it can crawl into your heart nonetheless. That’s not your fault, nor anybody’s fault and it is not simply solved. Not even by making your own out of wire, electrical tape and twine.
This article makes no sense. Also, the image depicting a Black woman and Black child is terrible media bias. Disappointing British Vogue...
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