Jealousy: It isn’t pretty but it can be helpful.

Jealously. It’s something that we’re kinda taught as a society to keep a handle on isn’t it? An emotion that we should pretend we don’t harbour, a “monster” that only bitter, weak people succumb to.

That isn’t true though. Not at all.

Jealously is actually quite a fruitful emotion – unless you let it fester and end up being the asshole sending snidey text messages to friend’s about other people (which isn’t jealousy, it’s just bitchiness and that can NEVER be fruitful.) I’m jealous of a lot of people and things – I don’t try to hide it, but I also never let it drag me down to being an unkind person. I use jealousy to help me work harder, drive harder and be better. It’s an emotion that, especially in business can be really helpful to help give you that passion to hit the next goal. I often feel jealous when I’m going through my Instagram feed and I see so many crafting with their kids and not holding handfuls of hair because they have ripped it from their scalps in despair and fitness models being slim and gorgeous… with their kids in tow. How ladies? How? I want that for myself. Is that an emotion that I should ignore? Hell no – and it’s not one that I will encourage my kids to ignore.

On a side note, you have to apply a bit of reality at this point – Instagram is all about what you choose to share, who you choose to follow and the reality that they want you to see… but it can be really inspirational.

Even when you relate it to family life, jealousy is something siblings feel all the time, it’s something that I feel when my children would rather have a bed time story with my mum or get my husband to spend the day with them. When I hadn’t been a mum all that long, was still learning what the fudge I was supposed to do and what I was actually going to do, I would set myself up to fail with a cycle of feeling jealous that Roo wanted Daddy and then awful that I wasn’t more support and was the kind of wicked witch that was actually jealous of my husband… There is nothing wrong with being jealous of your partner, jealous that daddy gets the cuddle when you’re the one that did the laundry, fed the kids, wiped the arse and all the rest of it and it feels like he’s just waltzed in through the door and you’re basically obsolete. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t the mum who looks on and adores watching that family time, that bond between father and child. It makes you normal. You know what else is normal? The reverse! You’ve just gone back to work, you’re on shared parental leave and your fucking cream crackered when you walk through the door – the living room is still a mess because Daddy and the kids, child minder and the kids, grandparent and the kids – whatever – has been playing right up until dinnertime, which it is now and you’re JEALOUS that they have had this time. This time you would like… and then you’re guilty because you tried to be a stay at home parent and you itched to get back to work. These are the times when we question ourselves, but what you’re feeling is so so normal – yet as a society we’re taught that jealousy is an emotion to be ashamed of.

I think we think of jealously in the wrong way, and apply it in the wrong way. I really do think that we should be teaching our children from a very young age that there is nothing wrong with being jealous of other’s achievements, provided we remain kind and respectful – we can say “I wish that was me!” and we shouldn’t be made to feel bad about that, in fact, we should be taught how to harness that. If we were more accepting of jealously and that it is a perfectly valid, even productive, emotion then we would see a decrease in things like workplace tensions where colleagues are snooping around to try and trip each other up and more working together to support each other and using one another as inspiration. Looking at a colleague and wondering how you can match them or be better than them is surely better than being conniving and feeling a repressed jealousy? If we taught our children that jealousy is just a normal part of being a human being, we could go a long way to alleviating the horrible mama guilt that rears it’s head when we feel guilty of our partners or other parents.

So yeah… jealousy. Not always a bad thing?