I don't know if men have a problem with loving and letting go. When I see the bumper sticker (usually on a pickup truck, right next to one that says, "No Fat Chicks"), "If you love something, set it free, and if it doesn't come back to you, hunt it down and shoot it," I wonder if that's one of those double-reverse-irony things, the roots of the stalking of an ex-wife or girlfriend, and, in its greatest extreme, of honor killing. Or maybe it's one of their feral tendencies that men need to be aware of in order to keep it under control, as cat-fights or infanticide are for women. I do know that loving and letting go is damned hard for ME, and I just don't know how to wiggle my way out of/around it.
Because here's the thing: Bozo is still with us. (Though now, at my son Billy's suggestion, we have re-wrought the name to Beaux Eaux, pronounced bo-ZO, meaning beautiful waters, and it's much more representative of the nature of this dog.) It seems I am not very good at marginalizing an animal that lives at my house. I really had thought that I'd be okay if we kept Beaux outside, in the garage at night, and crated when not being walked or trained or playing under supervision with the other dogs. He'd be extraneous to the core of the household, though we'd feed him and work with him, and prepare him for his real home, and we'd happily wave him off in the two or three weeks or so it would take to find The Right Beaux People. I wanted to make him a project, one of many I have around here (building the storage cabinets in the garage, installing new shower heads, pruning roses, stuff like that), and when the project was completed, I'd be perfectly fine with it. I'd Move On.
Well, not so much. I took my turn at taking Beaux to the adoption clinic in Albuquerque last Saturday, and I am lucky to have survived the experience. I still get weepy when I think of it. There lay all those scruffy, abandoned dogs: barking and wincing away from people and each other, and still trying their best to look appealing and helpful, to overcome for this one important moment whatever horrible abuse they'd already suffered, just trying to save their own lives and maybe find a family to love them if they should be extremely lucky. Beaux was right in the middle of all that frantic survival effort: whenever a car door would open, his tail would start banging furiously on the side of his wire crate. He'd stand up, and arch his neck, smile (really smile) and delicately lick any fingers pressed against the mesh. As Mary says, I never saw a dog try so hard to please, to appeal, to suppress the power of his body so as to seem as soft as his enormous heart.
And now, gentle readers, I find myself fallen in love with this animal. Before, I just worried that I was not doing right by him, that I was not taking good enough care of him, that he was at various times too cold, too sick, or too neglected, and that I wasn't living up to my responsibilities as fosterer of a dog. Since I was (or thought I was) keeping Beaux at arms' length emotionally, then my job was oddly more complicated: I had to figure out, to design, good care for him, against some vague SAT exam standard set by Professionals in the field of Dog Management.
I confess that that's how I tried to deal with life when my four children were small and seemingly hell-bent on killing themselves, each other and maybe me. It was a matter of management, I decided, with the eager concurrence of my middle-management husband and the father of these same little savages. While the father was not home (typically traveling four or five days a week), I had a regimen to follow, all laid out on a legal pad, and so I did, and did my damndest. Of course, when the father returned, there was the dreaded assessment of how well had I followed those instructions, and I usually came up short. In the business plan, he had neglected to accommodate the surprises that young, living mammals can spring on one, like contracting pneumonia, or finding themselves in the middle of a pin-worm epidemic, or splitting a scalp on the coffee table and bleeding like a stuck pig, or beating the living crap out of the next door neighbor kid and having the father of that kid show up in turn and beat the living crap out of our kid. People are messy, it turns out, and careful management of their lives and well-being is far more difficult than merely managing their widget-output over the course of an eight-hour workshift.
And what about making the distinction between catching hell for mismanagement, and suffering the self-inflicted, hard-wired, impossible-to-ignore, all-consuming love and caritas for these small and blinded, thrashing and weeping, shining and shit-covered creatures? I just didn't know what to DO with that. The father, having missed the drama of the week he had not been in residence, and having firmly in mind (and mind only) how delightful the children can be, would spend the weekend loving them, playing with them, being the perfect Dad, while I lay on my bed, cold-compressed, or giving in to the headcold I'd fought off all week, or just enfolded in misery at my incompetence and clearly apparent inability to love.
God knows what kind of scarring the kids sustained, not to mention my own. But that same God, knowing this, has given me AFOG -- Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth -- in the form of a huge, maddening, absolutely untrained, unmanaged child-dog. While the only drawbacks to Beaux Eaux are his unbridled enthusiasms and his sheer size, I am not so old nor so decrepit that I cannot in the end physically control him. We have honed our systems down now to where he is under control; we've child-proofed the house and yard, I've cut my fingernails as short as possible so as not to keep tearing them when I grab at his collar, we've accomplished the sit, the walk, the shut-up, the don't-climb-the-fence commands. What I never saw coming was how I would be struck dumb by the size of his heart, and the unquestioning love he has for me, no matter how I behave towards him. He just loves me; he is palpably grateful for my having saved his life, and for this he will do absolutely anything for me if I will just tell him what it is I expect.
And now I'm supposed to give him up??? Yes. We cannot keep him; he's not, after all, our dog. He has someplace he needs to be, and it is not here. We are sure of it, and we are sure that our job is to prepare him for that. If he were my child, it would be incumbent upon me to get him ready for college, for the world, for his real life, and then to release him to it. It's just like that -- this is my do-over, my unfinished lesson in love-and-let-go.
When I drove my youngest child to her first year of college, I cried for the entire two-and-a-half hour trip; I didn't just weep, understand -- this was sobbing, wrenching, heaving of the second chakra, and entirely uncharacteristic of what all of us, all along, had thought of as Me. My college-bound daughter must have (a) thought that my long-awaited derangement had finally occurred, and (b) worried for her physical safety on the California freeways. I don't know if she even remembers it, but I surely do, and I am terrified of the day when Beaux must leave here.
In the meantime, I'm trying really hard to learn that lesson; I do not want to have to go through this again. I paradoxically strain to relax and love Beaux Eaux, to enjoy his antics, to ignore the certain knowledge of his leaving, to stay present in the moment, and blah blah blah. I just hate this, and the more I think of how much I hate it, the more I know I have to do it.
Thank God I don't have to like it.
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