Goodbye Puppy

Tuesday morning, I woke up and walked into my living room to let my dog out to use the bathroom. I was not greeted by the usual clacking of his thick nails on my wooden floors. My feet were not licked from the mere joy of seeing me. I stood alone in my living room, surrounded by a darkness attempting to be penetrated by the lights of early morning. He was gone.

For over 10 years, Cole was the only constant in my life. He was the only boy that I kept around for long enough to call mine. After work, he would greet me with large barks from his tiny body and an excited running back and forth that made no sense and had no destination other than me. He would annoyingly beg for food on the rare occasions that we ate at the dinner table. He would vigorously shake a noisy toy as if it was a piñata filled with steak that he needed to release. He sat at my feet as I studied for the Bar. Both times. Quietly encouraging me and comforting me when I could barely believe in myself. He filled my lap and let his fur soak up my tears when my then love lost his life in a horrific way. And on Monday evening, he quietly looked at me from the arms of someone else as I kissed him goodbye and walked away forever.

It’s interesting the habits that we develop without realizing it. Every time I walk into the kitchen, my eyes automatically go to the small space that used to be filled with one of his many beds. So many beds. That lady must have thought we were crazy with giving her so many beds. As I go deeper in, my eyes search to see if he has any food in his bowls. She has those, too.

When I first moved to Ireland, I used to think he was with me. Children would scream outside and I would expect to hear him bark. I would walk around and expect to feel him nip at my feet. I would hear the wind howling and think it carried with it the sound of him whining. He wasn’t doing any of those things. He was here. Without me. Now, he is somewhere else without me.

I wonder if he’s thinking about me. I wonder if he thinks he did something wrong. “Why did someone else abandon me? I thought this one was going to keep me. She loved me for so long. She snuggled me and let me sleep in her bed. She dressed me up in costumes when her silly football team had games. Her sister put sweaters on me when she would walk me in the cold. Why didn’t they want me?” I hope that’s not what he’s thinking. I hope he knows how much I have loved him.

I hope she’s being nice to him. I hope she’s being nice to my dog. I never actually expected that the day would come when he wasn’t running amok around my house (Amok! Amok! Amok!), or licking random things, or driving me crazy because he peed on something. Or standing at the sliding glass doors with his back rigid and his ears perked up and his drumstick legs straight as needles as he barked at a cat that had bravely ventured into our yard.

My dog used to do the funniest things. Although, I guess he’s not my dog anymore.

Nighttime Realizations

It is 10:51 p.m., late in the Tuesday hours. In the corner of my bedroom is a dim light, turning the air into a faded orange against the darkness of this ordinary night. There is a tightness around my eyes that comes from an exhaustion that only a mother knows when vainly attempting to find comfort in her pillow. Three feet away, Little Miss begins to shuffle around in her tiny version of a bed. These not-so-gentle movements can only mean one thing: she needs me.

I get up and reach in gently, smiling at her open eyes that merely look like bottomless black holes in the distance beyond my eyesight's abilities. But I don't need to be able to see to know that she needs me.

As she latches on for the first of many nighttime cravings, I look down at her tiny head with its streaks of black (and hopefully straight) hair. I think of the bewildered smile on her face earlier that evening as I gave her a bath with delightfully warm and comforting water but not yet any rubber ducky. I notice her tiny nose and think of the gargantuan boogers it somehow houses, growing deep in the tunnels of her sweet kissable nostrils. She seems content to keep them and puts up quite a fight at my attempts to free them from their tiny cave. But to get rid of them, to breathe properly, she needs me.

I look down at her tiny hand, spread out on my chest, grasping on to my tired, spit-covered shirt. There is a little dimple at the base of each of her fingers, where they meet that hand that so lovingly grasps onto mine. I gaze at her paper thin fingernails and remember how they were long and razor sharp on the day she made her escape. I think of how I carefully, and apprehensively, cut her nails in her sleep, wondering which movement will rouse her as I try to protect her from ruining her sweet face. I look at the place she had scratched herself earlier and know that, to prevent those red angry lines, she needs me.

My body sustains hers.
My body nourishes hers.

My body produces, on its own, without any effort on my part, all she needs to be properly fed. I watch her inhale this food. I see the milk drip down her face and soak my shirt. I hear her gulping it in and swallowing it quickly and breathing heavily as she takes it. I clutch her as she arches her back to get more or less or beg for a burp. I have finally learned to read her signs. The signs that she needs me.

As she finishes her meal, her eyelids droop, her neverending delicate eyelashes lay for a rest on her cheeks, and her lips loosen. I kiss her head. I place my cheek on her head and realize that this is MY child. For so long, I hugged the children of my friends. I snuggled them for stories. I offered to change their diapers. I even reprimanded from time to time. But this little one is mine. She was made by Husband and me. She grew in my body, stretching it to new capacities, new marks and new pains. She relies on me for so many things.

But as I put her back in her bed, put on a series of lullabies that only I will remember years from now after the batteries in the music player have worn out and rusted over, and gaze at her sprawled out like a starfish escaping into a land of dreams, I realize that I had it wrong. I'm the one who needs her.