My adopted daughter roams around me as I type. She blends in, her coat the same shade as the newly aging brown wood of our fence before it turns to gray. She forms a Rockwell painting in my front yard. I type outside most mornings, now.
Refreshing.
She potties and comes back for kisses and cuddles from me. I envelop her small form.
She is love.
My biological daughter is coming around. By coming around, according to the numbers, I mean:
- 4 years begging for a dog
- 24 hours, and she was over it
- 1 nip too aggressive to her arm, she cries
- 8 days later, my bio girl is labile: “I love her. Get her away. I’m your favorite, right? Only mommy time.” Did I mention labile?
According to Ezra – a lead on my bio girl’s new fav binge watch – from The InBestigators (an Australian Netflix kid’s comedy), dogs are something he is allergic to and best described something like, “the lick of the dog is at once adorable and disgusting.”
Ezra sings my daughter’s Dog Days of Change, this week.
I can’t blame her. I felt this way as a sensitive child. It was more than the knockdown by the neighbor’s large breed overtaking my tiny frame.
Even as a teenager, the form of love that dogs offer: the tongue, the teeth, the jumping, the hyperactivity. Not my style. I’m…easily, openly over-stim stim.
By college, my then boyfriend’s sister fostered a puppy named Simon – mutt, maybe eight weeks old, less than six months to live. I met Simon and it was love. There was something primal, for the first time, that bonded me cross species in a way I never felt before. The love was straightforward; the pup so small, the needs so obvious and if I gave a little, Simon snuggled in for a loyal, long period of cozy. I’d say that Simon’s short life transformed my relationship to dogs. I understood the motivation and potential mutualisms between human and dog through an intimate imprint.
Two decades later, when I made my first visit to my sister-in-law’s (NOT the sister of my college boyfriend, the sister of my forever love…), I walked into what previously would have been my worst nightmare. There were four dogs and two cats. Animals moving about their day, I was a human in their way. In the least, I was the one who stole their blankets.
Animals moving about their day, I was a human in their way.
Except, I noticed that in my penchant for calm and stillness – aka, reading – an older, wise(st) dog named Shep schlepped onto my lap. I wasn’t confident that I was ready for smell proximity, licks, and forty-plus pounds upon my lap. Shep thought otherwise. She nestled upon me, every time I sat for reading. By day three, it was love. I began to appreciate the weight and the genuine eyes – eyes wanting, opportunistic yet connection, alone, was good enough.
Dogs: they are pretty straightforward.
Eat, sleep, sh*t, play, snuggle.
I thought my daughter was ready for this. At seven, as I said – half her life – begging for a dog just like those she gets to play with at her auntie’s…I was certain she had been ready for years.
She was ready, I thought, long before I was.
Yet, I realize living with a healthy, feisty puppy is not quite the same as spending a few days with a tiny vulnerable one or with middle aged dogs. Here we are, in full blown puppy.
I can only hope that Simon and Shep, who taught me true love with a dog, ground me enough to transmute confidence to my daughter now. By transmute, I mean model the compassion for my child’s point of view while demonstrating in translation of a dog’s mode of love and communication: demolition and endless appetite.
I can demonstrate that I may hold mixed feelings about the intrusive nature of slobber and enthusiasm.
I can demonstrate that love is love.
We are in this together, each time we show up – honoring the worth of our bond, human and dog.
Dog and kid were mutually happy, jumping all around, when the kid got off the bus.
We are one step closer to movement through the dog days of change.
ANXIETY ANSWERS 