A Different Shade of Green

This morning I was contemplating the evolution of my jealous tendencies.   Because I have time for stuff like that, right?  I read on Facebook the comment of a breastfeeding mom who said that she regularly pumped 20 ounces at her morning pump.  Let that sink in for just a sec.  20 OUNCES, I said!  My mind is REELING at the very thought.  Yeah, so obviously as a breastfeeding mom who does NOT regularly pump 20 ounces at her morning pump, I was jealous of that.  And then it hit me- I used to be jealous of normal things; a girl who was really cute or skinny, someone who is terribly organized or has a cute house, people who don’t like frappucinos and have book contracts.  I’m not saying I’m jealous in a mean, angry, secretly-want-to-hurt-them kind of way.  Just seeing something you admire and wish that you exhibited that yourself, kind of stuff.

I realized that the things that I’m “jealous” of have taken on new form in the past several months.  Which begged the question, is it wrong for a mom with a special needs child to be jealous?  Hearing my whole life that jealousy is a sin, and obviously not wanting to sin, I looked up the difference between “covet” and “jealous”.  I figured if I could get away with not violating one of the Ten Commandments on a technicality, then perhaps I’m not doing so bad.  But a quick check of the definitions did nothing for me.  According to Webster’s Dictionary, jealousy means “unhappy or angry feeling of wanting to have what someone else has” and the word envy means “painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage”.  I will caveat that my admiration of people with cute houses or people that pump lots of breast milk (20 ounces…seriously!) has never made me “unhappy or angry”, so whatever is down two notches from jealousy might be the real word that I’m looking for. 

But all this thinking and negotiating about whether or not I’m sinning caused me to think about what I am jealous of…or maybe more appropriately, what I see in others and admire. 

I see babies with legs that work and it hurts a little.  I see people that get packages shipped to their door from Amazon or Old Navy, where I get shipments of catheters from a medical supply company.  The real possibilities of what our lives are open to now makes me yearn for the day when I got to worry about fevers and flu.  Now we worry about brain surgery and whether we’d have time to be life-flighted to Vanderbilt in the event of acute onset of hydrocephalus.  I’m jealous of toes that wiggle.  And if I’m being honest (which, not being honest is also a violation of the Ten Commandments, so maybe I’m not all wrong here), there are days when that little tug in my heart starts to feel like a “painful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another”.

My heart grieves for my daughter at times, that she won’t get to stand on her tippy toes, that even if she dons ballet shoes, they probably won’t dance.  I grieve for the stares I know she’ll get, for the moments we’ll spend creating an “alternative way” to do most everything.  

I remember a Pinterest-viral saying that originated from Theodore Roosevelt, “comparison is the thief of joy”.   There is so, so much joy in this little face.  I don’t want anything, or any thought, or any advantage to steal the joy that I see when I look in this face. 

Our days do not have to be defined by spina bifida, although we have to work hard at making sure they are not.  Comparing what our lives could have been is a futile line of thinking and robs us of the absolute pleasure that is having this little girl in our lives.

I’ve also realized that another source of my jealousy stems from worry over the future.  I am reminded of wise words delivered to me on one of our darkest of days as we contemplated a new diagnosis and whether or not we should have fetal surgery, “Fix your eyes on Me, the One who never changes. By the time those waves reach you, they will have shrunk to proportions of My design.” (Sarah Young, Jesus Calling). 

I also have realized that when I’m jealous or envious or whatever the word is that makes my heart wish for those advantages, I’m imagining a scenario that was never ours for the taking. We weren’t given the option of a spina bifida-free Poppy.   To have a place where our worries are smaller, we’d have to live in a Poppy-less world.  And now that we’ve tasted and seen what a Poppy-full world looks like,  we wouldn’t trade one moment of life with this precious girl for all of the dancing toes in the New York City ballet.  And perhaps wishing for a spina bifida-free Poppy is like wishing for my other kids to have been born with wings- they just didn’t come that way. 

We’ve entered a new world.  It really is a different world for us.  Forever, I think.  It isn’t a bad world, it isn’t an unbearable world.  It’s just different. And breathtaking and stressful and delightful and heartbreaking, all at the same time.  Finding the balance between hope in miraculous possibilities and the reality of what our lives look like medically, statistically or scientifically, is a gray place for us.  Just the same way that wishing for our little girl to have things in life that most would consider a given can sometimes feel a little bit like jealousy.  

And I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.