Should We Get a Dog

The thing about a dog is that if it doesn’t work out, you can give it back. Give it back to the shelter, or the breeder, or put it on Craigslist. There will always be a sucker who will want a dog. Just like there will always be suckers who want babies, or think they want babies, because they’ve been told for ten or twenty or thirty years about babies and in certain places (well, most places at certain times) they see babies and smell babies and, at some point, they think I might regret this later, but I want one. 

This is how I usually feel about croissants – I might regret this later, but… A croissant you can usually run off, if you don’t eat too many in a row for too long. A dog you can return. The baby is different. When I had the baby and he cried all the time, I had to stand in the bathroom with the door closed and the light off and the fan on, clutching the baby while swaying back and forth, pretending that we were both still in the womb and none of this had ever happened. Sometimes I would think about pushing the baby back up my vagina, where it could claw its way back into my uterus and stay there forever. Maybe it would reverse its process and shrink back down to a grapefruit, a kiwi, a lima bean, the pin point of a pencil on paper, an invisible idea. 

Of course, that was not possible. My vagina hurt so much from the doctor who pushed his hand all up inside to scrap out the placenta that was not releasing itself. He scraped and scraped and it hurt for years. (Why does no one ever tell you these things? Well, I’m telling you now.) There in the bathroom I could only stand and sway like that, holding the baby, for ten minutes before my vagina was screaming What have you done to me? And I’d have to lie down, and my husband would take the baby and stand in the bathroom for the rest of the hour.  

With a dog, more or less, you know what you’re getting. Do you want a yappy little lapdog? Chihuhua. Society statement? Westie. New fad since Cuba became a thing? Havanese. You can choose the color, the size, and the temperament of your dog. And for the most part you can know what you’re getting into, in terms of bad hips or noses. These are things people think about when they breed dogs, or horses, or goats, or whatever. But it’s declasse to discuss this sort of thing when making babies, even though in certain circles we speak of lineage and money. She’s a Rockefeller… His father was Exxon Mobile... 

My husband can trace his ancestors back to the Mayflower, back to the kings of England. I thought this was cool, coming from a family whose entire history is lost beyond the names of the great grandparents murdered in another country. My husband is smart as a poodle, fast and fit as a Visla. By the time we met he’d had his eyes fixed to 20-20, something my bad eyes are beyond even considering. Great education? Check. Nice, unfussy parents? Check. With his bad teeth, he was pleased to find that mine are excellent. And his calm, practical demeanor was a good balance to my near-constant worry bordering on anxiety. 

But when I fell in love with my husband, the thing I considered most of all in the breeding consideration category was his Papa, the relative to whom he was closest and most wished to resemble. His Papa with the long face and big teeth who shot off fireworks in the driveway for fun, still rode his own mowing tractor at age 90, lit a fire every afternoon with wood he’d chopped himself and made his batty old wife and her batty old sister cocktails at 5 pm sharp from the bar cart they kept tucked in the living room coat closet. The last time I saw him, a few months before he died, he gave me two hugs. His face was sallow but he still smiled. When we walk in the forest and the light filters in just so, I feel like he’s walking with us. The morning I knew I was pregnant—it was a Wednesday—when we walked behind our house and saw the Great Horned Owl, I thought of him. 

But good god I had the rose glasses on! The bad eyes, the bad teeth, the crazy rigid hyper angry belligerent sensitive genes? The baby got all those. Yeah, he’s smart. Really scary super smart. But you breed for smart and you might get some other things along with those brain cells. Why doesn’t anyone ever tell you this? Well... 

My husband wants to be sure that the dog doesn’t ruin our life, scratch up the hundred-year-old floors that can’t be refinished, shed and track mud around and make us all sneeze. I won’t take care of the dog at all, he says, just making sure I understand the parameters. And your dog duties can’t push other household tasks onto my plate. Okay, I say, I get it. But will you keep an open mind that the dog might enrich our lives and not only have the potential to make everything miserable? Can you open yourself to that possibility? Yeah, says my husband. I stopped being completely closed-minded when I was 32. 

I think for me, 32 was when I stopped making exceptionally bad decisions. When I was 18 I liked to get in cars and drive very, very fast—once, Philly to Cleveland in six hours flat. It’s an eight-hour drive. You do the math. When I was 20, I followed a man I’d known for less than 24 hours deep into the Italian Alps where, if I’d screamed, there would have been only a handful of gigantic European mountain cows to hear me. At 28 I worked so stupidly hard at my nonprofit job that I gave myself chest pains and wound up in an emergency CAT scan to make sure I wasn’t having an embolism. Embolism ruled out, I got sent to the gastroenterologist who scoped my digestive track and diagnosed reflux (of course!) but that scope meant I had to shit out everything, and I thought I was going to die. My husband had to sit on the edge of the bathtub while I shat and shat, I was so scared, and we joked about how this is what we were in for—all the good stuff and also the shitting and the ass wiping. No one tells you this about marriage. No one told me, anyway. 

Scientists say that we all have ancient dog brains. That we have dog brains with a human cortex stuck on top, “a veneer of civilization”. Methodically weighing options, considering alternatives and then making decisions—like my husband does—is one way to go about things. Only, you should also be listening to your dog brain, the scientists say. There’s a point at which you can be risk-averse to your own detriment. There’s a point at which desire does make sense. 

But which part of my brain is it that wants a dog? My old dog brain? Of course it would want that! Or, is it the human part thinking that a little more shit and a lot more work will be outweighed by unconditional love and therapeutically soft ears? I’ve made some excellent decisions in my life so far, as well as a number of mortifyingly bad ones. Would the companionship of an actual dog’s brain allow me to interpret my desires with greater accuracy? 

I hate the smell of dog shit. The smell of other people’s baby’s shit makes me gag. But my baby’s poop smelled fine to me. It still does. My baby—who’s now capable of feeding and dressing himself, speaks in complexes sentences, goes to school, reads and writes and calculates insanely complicated equations in his head—also refuses to wipe his own ass. Neither will he use a Kleenex or lift the toilet seat. I’m sure it’s genetic. I’m also sure we fucked up somewhere, somehow. There’s probably a book on this, or a class, or a specialist who could help us. No one fucking told me these things could happen. But here we are. We are in it. 

When I’m 60, will I look back on how dumb I was when I was 42? 

Should we get a dog?