Must love dogs: my single 🐕 mom story
Welcoming a puppy home as an anxious, over-thinking, recovering control-freak.
It was 4am last Saturday morning when my 7-month-old puppy Maddie, who had been peacefully sleeping for the previous eight hours, stirred with faint whining at the foot of the bed in our Airbnb. We were on our first overnight trip together, when after a group vote of B+ manners at my aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, I decided we were ready to take it on the road for a weekend in Sedona. I booked a guesthouse on the property of a woman named Grace in Cottonwood, Arizona. This host also had a young pup and I figured in the event of any bad behavior, she might grant me a little of, well…her namesake.
Maddie, like many humans, gets travel-induced stage fright. In those wee hours of 4am she hadn’t gone in over a day. So I stuffed on my puffer jacket and sneakers, leashed her, and took her in the unfamiliar yard lacking all scent traces, steeling myself in the 30-degree desert temps for a best case scenario: crouching with iPhone flashlight and poop bag on goat-head laden gravel. The glamorous life of dog ownership!
Alas, no dice.
So again at daybreak I took her out, this time to the yard attached to the host pup Cleo’s doggie door, the yard with all the scents. (I’m learning so much. And now you are too!) Suddenly Cleo leapt through her door and the pups were playing like old friends. I locked the gate to give them space and in a flash they were off, and the gate latch — come to find out — was broken. They ran wildly chasing each other around and ignoring me and my commands. It was no more than 20 seconds, and they stopped short of making it to the street, but it felt like an eternity when they finally came trotting back. In the five months I’ve had Maddie, that was the first time she had ever been “out of my control.” Once my heart pressure had returned to normal, I was packing. That was enough vacation.
Maddie’s recall is about as good as you can imagine for a pre-pubescent puppy, which means it’s great under controlled situations and iffy at best with any distractions. Insert new pals and she’s acting her age like a kid in a candy shop — eager to please and eager to tease — especially if she’s got a toy (or another foreign body) stowed in her retriever jaws.
She’s been through two rounds of group classes and several 1-1 trainings, on top of my own coursework in Puppy Culture before bringing her home, but we’ve got a ways to go. A few weeks back, after getting a stern warning and a 10-inch long text message from the owner of her doggie day care, I was told she was getting kicked out. “She’s such a sweet pup and we wanted it to work out, but she’s eating our astroturf and we think it would be best if you work on that with her trainer. We can re-test her in a few months.” (Yes, a re-test. For a 6-month-old puppy.)
I did a massive volume of research and preparation before getting a dog. After growing up with them, then dog-sitting all throughout my 20s, I spent a couple of years in a transient lifestyle where pets were only seen in passing, the friendly fixtures of households that to me carried a warmth I just didn’t feel in homes without any animals. I spent about 6 months applying through multiple rescues and making occasional trips to PACC and Petco adoption events trying to find the pup for me. Along the way, I was turned down for many reasons (they wanted a family with kids, my yard was too small, I didn’t have a pool, etc.) and was thwarted in an odd variety of ways, from COVID cancellations to being ghosted by a guy who’d found a dog in a park, to timing misalignments. To be fair, I also didn’t choose many shelter dogs for reasons that were mostly due to obvious lifestyle clashes or temperament concerns, including one three-year-old female who tried to bite me defensively during our visit. I’m in awe of the patient souls who adopt these often traumatized good pups, but didn’t feel up to the task myself.
One day I was researching local ethical dog breeders and questions to interview them from the Humane Society, and the next I was researching a dog rescue based in Moab promoted by a popular Instagram influencer, Brianna Madia. I kept falling in love with dogs on their website and planning how I’d make the 1,200-mile round trip drive to bring one home. I had the snapshot in my mind of this scrappy, desert-dwelling creature and how I’d fatten them up with treats as they’d accompany me on hikes on our drive back.
I told myself: I could feel good about myself if I did that, because that would be the good person thing to do. That was what they said, anyway. But… who was they again?
Every time a rescue didn’t work out, I became increasingly suspicious of the universe’s blocks, and started to over-think and over-plot. I knew I needed a reset when I realized how much my brain rattled with loud opinions and perceived opinions from other people. As I recall transitions in my life that have felt good and aligned, there were no echoes of “should’ve” or “I-told-you-so” or “Do this and you’ll be a good person.” All of my most healthy decisions have just felt…clear. Like a single bell chiming in an empty room.
So I did some journaling (I should have from the start) based on exercises adapted from an intentional dating course run by the ever-wise Catherine Andrews. Through that, I learned that I had (at least) two limiting beliefs around pet ownership to work with and rewire:
First, I learned that I wanted to rescue a dog because I was judgmental of the version of myself that had the chance to save an animal, but instead got one from a perfectly good home, one that safely exposed her to all kinds of stimuli and children of different ages early on — a home that would be contractually and morally required to take her back should anything happen to me or my ability to care for her. I could watch her earliest moments and know she was raised in love. But all the while, I knew so many pups deserved that love, too. That I would adopt from a breeder made me feel selfish and ashamed. What was the negative core belief? I was selfish.
Second, I realized that I was afraid of getting a difficult dog from a rescue, because I knew I had to raise her as a single person. My fear was that I’d end up with a challenging dog with deep-seated social issues no trainer could resolve and no boarding facilities would accept. My fear was that she wouldn’t take to training and she would run off and get injured, or worse. Again, I peeled back the layers of this fear: that I would adopt from a shelter made me feel like I would end up alone. What was the negative core belief? I will lose the ones I love, and I will end up alone.
After I worked through all of that, and came up with my new belief, that I was never alone and always had support. I did some vision journaling: how did it feel 6 months from now with the dog who was mine? I closed my eyes and tried to feel it deep in my bones.
The result of that process: Miss Maddie, who grew up free of trauma, raised in complete love since Day One and is trained to the nines…and also was just kicked out of her doggie day care for bad behavior. I had to laugh after I got the call, because in one fell swoop it flipped the supposed logic of the thoughts that had charged my limiting beliefs. It proved that my thoughts were indeed totally fictitious conjecture around if this then that, like plot lines for characters in a novel. Had I not processed on paper, I might have believed these thoughts were true at face value, and not used them to dig deeper and take action.
My point is, the exercise didn’t help me dodge painful or uncertain moments or guide me to the single correct decision or outcome of which there never is one. It simply meant I was no longer paralyzed in indecision by my limiting beliefs.
Anyhow, after I shit-talked this day care to at least seven friends (and also a few trainers in town who confirmed it was weird to expect a 5-month-old Labrador to not chew on things), I stewed for a bit wondering why this was striking such a nerve. The answer of course is that it was directly testing my limiting belief that I will end up alone. The mental bullshit business was already sorted, at least on paper, so I had a game plan. I spent a weekend in action, calling anyone and everyone, meeting Rover sitters and calling references from the front desks of boarding places, before connecting with an even better arrangement for her holiday care: a trainer with availability where she can stay in a real home — with another puppy! (Plus, I racked up a short-list of back-up sitters through the process.) Before slipping too far into resentment and victimhood, I got empowered and felt supported.
Now, none of this was done perfectly. It’s tested my mental health and put a strain on my relationships to degrees that are frankly embarrassing to admit (although, goddess bless the Puppy 101 Reddit community for reminding me that this is hard for other people, too.) My deepest moments of self-doubt have been when I’m sleep-deprived. I probably had a full night of sleep 5 times in her first 3 months. This is when I go to the dark place, the place where I am “forever alone.” This is when I try to tell myself she’d be better off with a family, or a couple, one where they can split the duties. This is when I feel inadequate, and then I feel the shame for being alone. Again, I can revisit my mental game plan, get some rest, ask for help, reset. Inevitably, it passes.
Have I mentioned that she is getting SO big? She is over 55 pounds now, and developing a personality I genuinely enjoy: goofy and rebellious at times but stoical at others. On lunch breaks sometimes I’ll spray the hose in the yard while she chases it around in unbridled delight. She loves celery and sounds so cute chewing on it. She’s been on two sure-footed hikes in Madera Canyon, for which she is named, and knows a ton of tricks. We’re working on learning to bring in the newspaper like my childhood dog, Maizy, used to do. (Maizy was a pink nosed yellow lab, too, and she was The Best Dog.)
The other day I looked at her looking back at me and for a fleeting moment I had the thought that I didn’t want the time to pass any faster.
On our drive home from Sedona to Tucson we listened to the audiobook for Madia’s memoir, “Nowhere for Very Long.” I teared up at the part of the story for which I’d held my breath, the part I sort of knew based on IG scuttle-butt in years past, the part where she nearly loses her dog, Dagwood. In a version of her story told by someone else, his injury could have been avoided if she and her husband had been more responsible, if they had trained him better, if they kept him on a leash. In another, it was merely an accident brought on by a life lived untethered, the only life this dog would tolerate. I could feel the judgment and also the grief simmering and intermingling but it wasn’t about her at all. I imagined the panic and dread that will lie ahead for me caring for my own dog, like when she got loose earlier that morning. My brain wants to solve for every angle of every piece of uncertainty: if I can hire the best trainer she will behave, if I buy the best harness she’ll never slip out, if I watch her like a hawk she’ll never eat something bad, and I’ll never make a mistake, and she’ll be perfect, and she’ll never leave me, and I’ll never have to be alone…and then we will be OK.
But this is the risk we take in caring for another which is I believe an inevitable part of the human experience no matter if we become human parents or pet parents: that we may try our best, and still fail at times. And that it’s worth taking the chance.
Last week, I went on a first date at a local movie rental shop that also serves beers because lol, Tucson. The conversation was fine, which is code for “I was bored,” but the kicker was when I started telling him a story about my puppy.
“Well, she’s not spayed yet so it’s hard to find places that will take her, but I called around and finally got some house sitters, and there’s a trainer that can watch her over the holidays…” His eyes glazed over and I could see the words in his face and the meaning behind them before they came out of his mouth:
“Yeah, having a dog just sounds like a lot of work...” What he said wasn’t wrong, but he was.
I paid my check while he was in the bathroom, and came home to Maddie, who was patiently awaiting my return.