Uncomfortably Small and Fragile
On caregiving and foster fails
I am lying in bed, snuggled next to 20 pounds of snoring, bed-hogging cuteness. I am fully dressed in a T-shirt, sweatshirt, joggers and socks because I have to be ready to leap out of bed at a moment's notice to tend to the bodily functions of this creature. Also because this cute bed hog is somehow lying on top of ALL the blankets. Also because even if I had the blanket, I would be afraid to put it over both of us, because he might smother.Â
The 20 pounds of cuteness sharing my bed is a puppy, not a newborn baby human, and while I am very aware that taking care of a puppy and taking care of a baby are not the same thing, my emotions tell a different story.
This is a story about parenting, and about pets, and about trying to understand why and how caregiving is so incredibly hard for me, why it makes me feel like I am coming apart at the seams and why I want to run from it but also how I sacrifice myself on its altar. You know, just normal mid-December stuff!Â
Some background: My family has been looking for a dog to adopt for months. So many months! You may have heard that adopting a dog during the pandemic became a bit Hunger Games-ish, and we definitely felt that. Dogs we were interested in were disappearing while we were still on Page 1 of the lengthy and detailed application. Shelters we had booked appointments would call us to say the dog had gone home with someone else. One time we went to see a dog, and its real owners came in to reclaim the dog as we were seeing it! Bottom line is that it's been tough.
Undergirding all of this have been a lot of questions. What kind of dog do we want? Are we ready to add another pet to our household? How will it change our lifestyle? Will the new dog get along with our current pets (one old dog and one even older cat)? In the end, we felt like we were up for the challenge and wanted to give it a shot.
Dog #1: Big White Dog
Big White Dog showed up on our local animal shelter in October. We had been talking about how what we wanted was a big dumb sweetie, and when I saw this guy — his calm, happy demeanor and unbothered ways, so different from our anxious border collie mix at home — and I felt like this could be our man. When he became adoptable, I messaged my friend who's involved with the shelter and asked if she knew anything about him. Within minutes, she had added me to a group chat with the shelter director. I was told they would cat test him for me and invited to come see him that very afternoon. I was so excited that I ran upstairs to find my husband and basically said YOU HAVE TO GO TO THE ANIMAL SHELTER RIGHT NOW. And he did, because he loves Great Pyrs too and we were so excited to find one. So excited, in fact, that without really stopping to think, we agreed to adopt a 100-pound, recently neutered, not housebroken dog who didn't know how to use stairs.
Big White Dog came to our house on a sunny fall afternoon. He was excited and friendly and clearly had spent almost no time in a house before. We knew we had to keep him separate from our dog at first so that they each had their own space. So he and I took up residence in the downstairs hallway of my house. We blocked off the stairs with a dog crate, and I put a chair in the hallway, and he and I settled in for a long afternoon, evening, and night.
There was something very familiar about how I felt as I watched him pace, whine, and finally settle down to rest. I sat vigilant in my chair, pretending to read a book, periodically messaging my husband to check in, completely isolated from the rest of my family, unable to leave my post for even a minute. I felt outwardly calm but also deeply and profoundly terrified — a feeling I recognized from the days and weeks after my daughter was born. It was a feeling of having stepped through a door and into a world where I would not relax, where I would not ever stop, for a single moment, tending to or thinking about the needs of this other creature. And something about the insistence of those needs — there's no better word for it. It terrified me.
Later that night, I took Big White Dog outside for one of our countless trips to the back yard. He walked back and forth a couple times, then sat down in the grass, and I sat down next to him. In the darkness, we heard the cows on my neighbor's farm calling to each other, and the big dog's face changed from goofy and relaxed to alert and purposeful. His huge soft snout sniffed the air, and his eyes searched the horizon. I sat with him for a few more minutes as he tried to figure out where the animals were, and if they needed his help. Then, with a heavy heart, I tugged gently on his leash and led him back inside the tiny hallway where the two of us would spend the rest of the night.Â
It is painful to bump so hard up against my own limitations as a person, as a caregiver.
Big White Dog lasted about 24 hours in our house. When I called the shelter the next day to tell them we were bringing him back, I told them about the cows calling in our back yard, and how I thought this dog belonged somewhere bigger, someplace where he could sit outside for as long as he wanted. Somewhere he could do a job. I didn't tell them about how terrified I had felt, watching him sleep on the hallway floor, sitting on my straight-backed chair with no hope of rest. I didn't tell them how hopeless and helpless I had felt, and how it was that feeling that made me tell my husband, "I think we could do this, but I don't really want to."
I could do this, but I don't really want to. That feeling defined my existence for the first several weeks after my daughter was born. I didn't feel particularly depressed — I still felt drawn to things, still wanted to do things, still experienced joy. I didn't feel particularly anxious — there were worries that popped up here and there, but the prevailing feeling was not one of anxiety, a sensation I know incredibly well. No, this was something different. It was a sort of pre-fatigue or overwhelm. It was the feeling of staring down a long, dark tunnel and knowing that, sure, technically, there's a light waaaay down there somewhere, but I really don't feel like traveling through this particular tunnel at this time and I am not that encouraged by the light.
It is not easy for me to admit this; any of it. How much I did not want to actually care for my own newborn child. How quickly I noped out of taking care of this big dumb sweetie of a dog; a dog so sweet and gentle and good that it is a little bit painful to look at his picture. A dog I only knew for 24 hours. A dog who was, quite literally, my husband's dream dog. It is embarrassing. It is painful to bump so hard up against my own limitations as a person, as a caregiver. But this is what happened: I called the shelter, I coaxed Big White Dog into the back seat of my hatchback, I drove him to the shelter and I said goodbye. And the relief I felt was palpable, but also humiliating.
Dog #2: Little Jerry Seinfeld
After the fail that was Big White Dog, we went in the opposite direction: smaller, sweeter, more submissive. And that brought us to a dog the shelter called Benny, but who we eventually started calling Little Jerry Seinfeld. We met him on a Friday afternoon in early November, and he was so sweet and friendly with my 9yo (who had felt scared of Big White Dog, who didn't seem to be aware of where his own butt was at any given time). We agreed to bring Little Jerry home for a trial adoption of up to two weeks, and as a family, we pledged that we would give Little Jerry a fair shake.
The first 24 hours or so went remarkably similar to Big White Dog's stay with us. Little Jerry and I camped out downstairs; I felt terrified and isolated; my daughter was sad because no one was paying any attention to her; and my dog was out of his mind with anxiety because there was a strange dog living in his basement.
But slowly, it got better. We took the dogs to the dog park and they ran and played together — something my dog, in all his 12 years, had never really done with another dog. Little Jerry stopped having accidents in the house. He went into his crate at bedtime. My husband taught him sit, stay and shake.
At night, he would wake up around midnight and whine to go outside, and I would take him out to pee, and then he would hop up on the bed and curl up next to me and tuck his tiny cold snout into the crook of my neck and fall asleep with his nose pressed against my collarbone. He started to work his way into my heart, even with his horrible rat tail and all.
But it was still so hard. He spent hours just wandering around the house chewing on things (typical puppy stuff, I know, but hard for me to deal with). He pranced at my 17-year-old cat incessantly. He exhausted my 12-year-old dog, who never knows when to walk away from a provocation. He wasn't really crate-trained. My 9yo, who had been so enthusiastic about adopting a puppy, had lost interest almost as soon as we brought him home.
"He's not the dog of our hearts" is what I said to my family, and it was true — despite his good qualities (including snuggliness and cuteness), Jerry wasn't quite the dog we had envisioned ourselves adopting. So we had to ask ourselves if it was worth it. We had to try to figure out if we wanted to push through this period of chaos to reach a calmer future that might look a little different than we had imagined, but maybe would still be good. And in the end, the answer was "no." I called the shelter a second time, and for the second time, I loaded a dog up into my car and drove him back, and felt the same mixture of relief and humiliation.
What I learned through this double-dog failure was that my world had become very small — almost uncomfortably small — and very fragile. So small and fragile that even the slightest disturbance had the impact of an earthquake. I learned that in many important ways, I am not resilient; I am brittle, and I am terrified that I will break. I learned that my fragility and my fear are barriers that are preventing me from living the life I want to live. And you know what, it didn't feel good.
We have talked as a family about trying to push the walls of our world out a little farther. I have been trying to sit with my own discomfort when we do. It is hard. But it is also important. Because of course, pushing out the walls of our world is the only way to let love in.
But there is another way in which all this has resonated over the past week or so, as questions about rights and duties and caregiving have been center stage in a national debate. Dogs are not babies and babies are not dogs. Still, deciding what to do with Little Jerry reminded me of how I felt when I found out I was pregnant, knowing that no matter what course of action I chose, it could resonate throughout the rest of my life. Listening to the Supreme Court arguments made me think about the ways in which caregiving asks so much of us, puts so many of our own needs on hold, and shrinks our worlds down into something tiny and fragile. And it made me think about how important it is to be able to choose if that is the kind of chaos you are willing to push through, or if it is not worth it, for any number of reasons. If these things are on your mind too, I hope you'll consider making a donation to a local or national abortion fund, like the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, the Texas Equal Access Fund, the National Abortion Federation or the National Network of Abortion Funds.
This has been a very vulnerable edition of Think of the Children, a twice-monthly newsletter about the intersection of parenting and education, and sometimes dogs and abortion. If you enjoyed reading, won't you consider subscribing? It's free and I love hearing from you.