PUPPY LOVE
She may be just a dog to you, but she’s my baby,
Sometimes I put my dog in sweaters. Or pearls.
“It’s a pet, Carli. Not a kid,” I’m told often, and usually by friends who have children. Though it’s not because I’ve accessorized her — as I usually do this in private, and to music — it’s the response I get when I say I have to leave wherever it is I am to get home to Fig, my seven-and-a-half-year-old French bulldog. And the comment stings each time it’s made.
For some reason, people think I need to hear it. Like I can’t count legs. I can, and I acknowledge the logical, tangible and biological disparities between animal and human. However, just because people and puppies are different, do parenthood and pet ownership necessarily have to be?
In no particular order: I love laughing, I love a good night’s sleep, and/or Netflix. I love sweating, my slow cooker, spending time with family, and spending money at the Dollar Store. I love reading next to my partner and falling asleep in clean sheets. I also really, really love my dog — and this love is different. Not bigger or smaller, just different.
This love gets me out of bed and into the cold darkness of my yard, wearing nothing but a bathrobe and slippers, at all hours of the night. This love forces me to familiarize myself with her figure by hand, so I can feel for foreign lumps with braille precision as she ages. This love had me (rather inconveniently) “splitting custody” for some time with an ex, who also loved her dearly, until we both agreed it made more sense for me to assume guardianship in full.
This love helps me justify the high cost per can of food from the vet — the kind that wont upset her intestinal lymphangiectasia, a diagnosis she received two years ago that has made every moment with her since feel both precious and precarious. This love is sometimes the only kind of love I can muster, when in that moment the thought of loving even myself seems ambitious and forced.
Yet, if ever I jokingly refer to myself as a dog-mom, or Fig as a fur-baby, I am quickly stopped in my semantic tracks. It seems that just uttering the term appears to offend some, turning an otherwise pleasant conversation into a competition over who’s had less sleep in the last year. To suggest that caring for a pet is anything like caring for a child somehow seems to bring my overall comprehension of “caring” into question.
I recently came across a comment thread in a community chat group regarding my local Canadian Tire changing its policies to allow dogs in the store. Most of the commenters were vehemently opposed. Crudely worded concerns about barking and tinkle puddles were composed in a queue, which I scanned carefully on my smartphone in a coffee shop.
Afew tables down from me, a young boy tipped a container of Goldfish crackers onto the floor and repeatedly hollered the word “that” at the woman accompanying him, who remained entirely unfazed. As the woman knelt dutifully to collect the snack food, keeping one hand on her child, she briefly glanced my way. Her look was not apologetic and perhaps that’s because mine was not condemning. This was a child being a child, and a woman doing her best to be a parent. Like pee-pee, crackers can quickly be cleaned up. Accidents happen, after all.
What’s interesting is that I didn’t need to ask this woman if she gave birth to the fish-flinging tot in order to label this act of caring and responsibility as “parenting.” She could have been an aunt, or a nanny or a deranged psychopath who’d just snatched the youngster from someone else’s station wagon. But when she told the child, “Mommy will get it,” I was not about to challenge the way she self-identifies. She knows who she is in relation to this being and that’s enough for me.
Fig may not need a college fund, I don’t have to worry about her getting into my makeup as a toddler or drugs as a teen; and she’s been spayed, so I don’t need to sit through her appeal to go on the pill at 14 “for her skin” either. I do feel joy when she’s happy, worry when she sick, responsible when in public.
And when I’m alone and the thought creeps in, I cry heavy, soul-sourced tears at the notion of eventually losing her.
True, the circumstances of parenthood and pet ownership are not exactly the same, but the feelings that come with each can be. Devotion, purpose, pride and fear exist in both worlds — even if the world you and your pet have created will only exist for a short period of time.
I cannot say if I love my dog like I love my child, because I don’t have a child yet. I can tell you, however, that I love my dog with all the love that’s in me to give. And if that’s not the same way you love your children, perhaps it’s you who doesn’t understand the meaning of parenting.