In Iran, my girlfriend Susan and I were due to have babies at about the same time.  Her sexy husband—the one who, according to Susan, spent his nights thinking of inventive ways to drive her wild with passion, and his days selling stolen Kuwaiti cars on the black market— was planning on joining her in England for the delivery. He was having some trouble, however, because he had yet to satisfy his compulsory military service. If he showed up at the airport with his passport, which clearly showed, by the lack of a stamp, that he hadn’t satisfied his civil duty, he’d be picked up and thrown into boot camp.

One night he explained how he’d managed to leave Iran, illegally, the last time Susan had given birth. He described how he’d hitchhiked across Baluchistan, an untamed province in the east, guarded over by renegade warlords ruling unchecked over poppy-growing domains, a place where even the bravest law enforcement officials refused to set foot. He explained how he’d hung out with drug runners for a couple of weeks, met some lovely arms dealers, nearly got himself killed in an attack by a rival gang, and how he’d been smuggled across the border on a bumpy footpath in the trunk of a car.
 
While he spoke, Susan’s six-year-old appeared. Remarkably polished in his pressed white shirt, woven belt, and corduroy trousers; with his slicked back hair and clip-on tie round his neck, he looked more like Edward R. Murrow than a little boy.
 

“Mummy,” he said, doing his best not to be rude. “We’re trying to have a go at Chutes and Ladders, but the others won’t leave us alone.” His voice, sweet and polite, was the obvious result of proper parenting.

We went back to sort the children out.  Susan opened one of the bedroom doors. In a snapshot, I took the room in. Matching twin beds with soft wool blankets on opposite ends of the room, a snugly stuffed animal snoozing peacefully on each plump pillow.  In the far corner, on a set of painted bookshelves, a neatly displayed collection of English storybooks and the latest action figurines. My three-year-old daughter, Iman, at the center of the room, her ponytail askew, a yellow, plastic gingerbread man wedged between her teeth.

More than anything, I wanted to be just like Susan. I wanted to possess her light heartedness, to be the kind of housewife and mother she portrayed. Frankly, I was jealous of Susan, not in the competitive sense, but in the comparative one. Next to Susan, I felt like a hot mess. I was perpetually irritated and resentful. My sex life consisted of sixty-second sessions of hide the salami. My husband sat around in his dish-dasha drinking tea. He wasn’t thinking up clever ways to make more money. My daughter looked like a sharecropper’s child; not some 1950’s newscaster. The dorm room I lived in was as cozy as an Appalachian shanty, complete with grandma picking her teeth in the living room, chickens on the balcony, and three days worth of greasy dishes stacked in the sink.

  
It was as though Susan had been handed the user’s manual to life when she’d arrived in Iran two years before me, and they’d somehow run out of them by the time I’d walked through the door. Instead, I’d been assigned 101 Ways to Boil Rice.

 But the more I thought about it, what I was really jealous of was the way Susan’s husband loved her. He was willing to walk eight hundred miles across deserts and mountains, to wade through drug runners, arms dealers, and tribal gangs, to stuff himself in the trunk of a car and sneak across the border, just to be with her. And he was willing to do it all over again. Not just once, but for however many times it took.

 I couldn’t imagine my husband hopping over a goat path to get to me.

Jealousy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about jealousy down in Georgia. I’ll be here for six weeks working on my book. The one I’ve been slogging away on for close to five years. I feel some pressure to finish it up because several of my friends from school have gotten their books published already.   It seems to me that while I’ve been contemplating my navel, they’ve managed to turn doodles on the back of cocktail napkins into War and Peace.They’re really good writers and really good people but, truth be told, I’m petty enough to be jealous of their success and to often wish them ill. I mean, who handed them the fortitude and pith and left me out?

Not long ago, my friend Stephanie, one of those talented writers I envision being hit by a bus, reminded me of an Anne Lamott book I love called Bird by Bird .  (By the way, check out Stephaine’s book, My Summer of Southern Discomfort.   She’s so good she makes me sick.) I brought it down to Georgia with me because I’d learned so much from it the first go round, particularly the bit about listening to one’s intuition, instead of ignoring one’s inner voice. 

When we listened to our intuition when we were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished.  God forbid you should have your own opinions or perceptions–better to have head lice.  If you asked innocently, “Why is Mom in the bathroom crying?,” you might be told, “Mom isn’t crying; Mom has allergies.”…And you nodded, even though you knew that these were lies, because it was important to stay on the adults’ good side.  There was no one else to take care of you, and if you questioned them too adamantly, you’d probably get sent to your room without dinner, or they’d drive a stake through your ankles and leave you on the hillside above the Mobil station.

This time I’ve locked onto Anne Lamott’s thoughts on jealousy, an emotion I hate to admit I struggle with. A lot.  Here’s what she has to say about the green eyed monster, in this case, the kind writer’s often feel for one another: 

Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster.  But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know—people who are, in other words, not you.

Which reminds me an awful lot of Harvard, where I began my writing career. Where I got my first taste of writing jealousy.

I sat one evening in my Feature Writing class at Harvard.  Although I clearly was not cut out to be a journalist, writing about everything on the planet but the one topic I was obsessed with –Me—I found myself wrestling with a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“So when my article, Hot Chicks and their Cars, got accepted by Glamour,” the Pamela Anderson look-alike that never failed to sit beside me said, “I like so totally flipped out that my husband?—he’s, like, the owner of The Blue Martini if any of you guys ever want to come downtown for a drink?—practically had to sedate me?!”

“That’s wonderful Candace,” the instructor said, “ Would you like to share with the class how you got yourself published in a major magazine?”

The blonde snapped her gum and licked her shiny lips.
 

“Well,” she began, “I found this reference book with all the names and numbers of editors in the print industry?” I could tell that Candace was the kind of woman who made questions out of simple statements and I cringed at the agony that was her voice. “And then I found the name of the editor for the lifestyle section?”  And then she went on and on and on.

The instructor nodded encouragingly and the rest of the class focused their attention on the 36D’s heaving beneath Candace’s Gucci sweater.

For a moment or two I envisioned Candace burning in the flames of hell. Her coral lips fused shut with molten lip-gloss.

 And I decided that what I really felt was rage. My God, I thought, with a modicum of effort I should be able to get my work published if a moron like Candace could.

You are going to feel awful beyond words.  You are going to have a number of days in a row where you hate everyone and don’t believe in anything.  If you do know the author whose turn it is, he or she will inevitably say that it will be your turn next, which is what the bride always says to you at each successive wedding, while you grow older and more decayed. It can wreak just the tiniest bit of havoc with your self-esteem to find that you are hoping for small bad things to happen to this friend—for, say, her head to blow up.

But, truth be told, Candace and her 36D’s (can you tell what else I’m jealous of?) really helped me. I realized that you don’t know what you really want in life,what you’re willing to put your energy into, until you find yourself inexplicably angry. Translation: inexplicably jealous.
 
I know, for example, that I never feel jealous of people who bowl really well, or make a mean borscht, or know the batting averages of every baseball player since Leonardo DiVinci walked the planet. Because I don’t care. These are not qualities I identify with. 

To understand me well, to know where my insecurities and shortcomings lie, here is an abbreviated list of people I feel jealous of:

• great writers–particularly my friends, and authors under the age of twelve
• anyone who runs longer and faster than me
• women who wear a size two and lament about their troubles gaining weight
• loving families with adult children who consider Mom and Dad their bestest friends
• busy working women with clean houses, the kind showcased in Better Homes & Gardens
• people who can laugh uproariously at tv shows and stupid jokes
• those who can freely express emotion
• women who have it all–brains, beauty, creativity, influence, and education 
• people who claim to be balanced 

.

I love Anne Lamott’s thoughts on the cause of our shameful, negative emotions . It explains why I’m jealous of my talented friends, like Stephanie, and why I no longer feel jealous of women, like Susan, who are truly loved by their husbands:

My therapist said that jealousy is a secondary emotion, that it is born out of feeling excluded and deprived, and that if I worked on those age-old feelings, I would probably break through the jealousy.  I tried to get her to give me a prescription for Prozac, but she said that this other writer was in my life to help me heal my past.

Jealousy is there to show us which part of our lives need work. Because it’s always easier to feel shitty, to begrudge other people their success and happiness, than it is to put in the labor.  That being said, it’s time for me to get back to my book.