My Dog Sounder

The end of pregnancy is hard and emotionally and physically I find it a challenge to get through each and every day. When I am home, it is the physical exertion my two boys and the house work require and when I am at work, it is the mental fatigue and the intense soreness that comes from sitting at a desk all day. It’s hard and in this third pregnancy I am struggling.

Yesterday when I arrived home from work I was wiped. All I wanted to do was lay down for a moment. However, when I walked in the door I heard my hubby on the phone having what was  clearly a serious convo. He hung up to tell me it was the vet and our dog, who we have been treating for the last 6 months for a chronic and ever worsening ear infection, had finally been diagnosed – with the assistance of a very expensive culture test – with an antibiotic resistant bacterial ear infection.

I’m not dumb, I work in health-care and I know what an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection means. This infection has already perforated his left ear drum and left him whimpering in pain and smelling as if his ear is rotting from the inside out and now we find out it may be untreatable.

My first reaction was to ignore the news and go to sit down because at that moment, I could not deal. As I went to sit on the couch, I realized there was dog fur all over it and the familiar rotting stench was wafting up from it. I felt angry. My dog has a big, cushy bed right next to the couch that stinks up the entire living room and now he has decided to lay on the couch?!?

I had a sudden flash of sheer hatred for that dog. I sent him out to the deck, I sat down on the stink couch, grabbed my laptop and updated my Facebook status to read:

I seriosuly don’t want a Dog anymore. But the guilt is so bad I can’t actually act on that feeling.

In that moment I was being honest, it was how I felt. On my blog, as a mother, a wife, a friend, as a person in this world, I try to be honest as much as I possibly can about how I feel. I write candidly on my blog about the pitfalls of motherhood; I try to express the reality that I am inherently flawed, that I am no saint, that sometimes I downright suck.

I do this because I think the old guard of presenting the picture of family life as sunshine, lolly-pops and rainbows is a huge crock that only leads to isolation, doubt and self loathing. I write the truth because I know some other mother or father or dog owner will be able to relate and feel a little less alone and also selfishly, yes, because sometimes I need a little moral support.

Overall my FB update elicited that support (thank you BTW peeps) I needed in that moment and I was grateful. However, one person thought my status update was terrible, something that should never be written down. She not only told me that but also unfriended me. To say I wasn’t hurt would be a lie. I have known this person a long time and I really did not think us not seeing eye-to-eye in that moment warranted us not being friends on FB anymore.

The truth, I love my dog and I would never give him away. He is a perfect, gentle, sweet, low maintenance golden retriever who, from the first moment I met him at the shelter when he bounded over to me, leaned against me and looked up at me with his big brown eyes, owns my heart thoroughly and completely.

The rest of the truth, I just put my 18yo cat down 2 weeks ago, I am expecting my 3rd baby in 8 weeks and she is apparently very small at this point and they want to run further tests, my 17mo has been really sick this last week with a terrible fever and weird rash all over his body, we just offered on a bigger house last week that did not work out and I am tired and sore and overwhelmed and the prospect of my dog dying of a god-damn ear infection is just TOO MUCH!

And so I vented and I got judged and it hurt but, in the end it was helpful because it sped up the wallowing in self pity, angry aspect of my grief and got me to the reality stage which is: I may lose my dog and I am profoundly saddened by that.

I am still going to be me; I am flawed, I am imperfect, I may never be enough but I do the best I can and I hope my best is just enough. It has to be… cause it’s all I got.