Strange Parallels Between Us and Our Dogs

The ground outside is wet. I’m not inspired to write – I’m inspired to sleep until ten, which I’ve already done. But we’re here, it just happened this way, and we’ll see how it goes. Our dog is furled up nose to paw along the grooves of a pregnancy pillow. He loves that thing. I don’t know why we have it. It sits snug between his crate and recliner, and he shares window light with the terracotta houseplant. His eyebrows are matted up all covering his eyes, but he’ll peer through every once in awhile without moving his head just to make sure I’m minding my own business. If the music’s too loud for his liking, he’ll let out a four-second guttural sigh from his lonely, disrupted corner. He and I are much the same, and I think about this often.

I tried talking to him one day. Ryan was gone for work, and we sat together on the couch. He’s better at eye contact than a lot of humans I’ve met until he senses that something might be wrong, in which case he’ll flit his eyes back and forth with his neck craned down until you pull him into your chest for rescuing. He hangs for dear life onto the words we say, and when we speak, he responds appropriately every time. It’s still hard to tell if that’s characteristic of a good, obedient listener or just someone who’s scared to let you down. I cupped his face and brought it close to mine, and I said to him, “Baby, if you can talk, just say anything. One tiny, little word. I won’t tell a soul!” And he gets this frantic look in his kind eyes that’s worried you’ve just offered him something that he’s unable to fulfill. Out of all the many tricks in his brilliant repertoire, I had chosen the one that wouldn’t come, and he retreated to his room.

His room is just the kennel that he stays in when we leave home. A two-toned quilt remains folded over top to keep it dim and sheltered and safe from outside forces. On top is also the graveyard where leashes and fashion bandanas and unused waste bags go to die until they’re resurrected another time. There’s a grey fleece that fits nicely inside for him to circle around in until he’s found his final form. He must like it in there, because there’s little to no effort in getting him settled on our part. The kennel door is merely a suggestion that I think he’d respect even if left ajar.

He’s bound to social rules and only rarely feels frisky enough to toe that line, and it’s usually when Dad and I are around to slap his wrist and tell him he knows better. He’s a sneaky little bastard that’s seduced by rebellious ideals but values loyalty to his people more than the thrill of saying no. I wish I could communicate how lucky he is to have learned this lesson – faster than me, but maybe I have to be thirty before that kind of maturity really takes root. Some people say that about your twenties.

It must have been last year when I noticed, but Ryan and I were in a tiff that could have been about any number of things. We sat oceans apart in our small living room. I cursed at him while he continued unsuccessfully to land his point. Our dog is intuitive and gets nervous when tensions run high between the girl and the boy that raise him. There’s not a moment when he positions himself within eyeshot of only one of us – it has to be both. And when we fight, I think it gets tougher for him to breathe. The air gets thicker and hotter and I know he feels like his being there is inconvenient.

This night, I watched him slink off his chair and into his open crate. I’m sure he prayed for us to shut the door and lock him up tight, but at least it was black and there were walls. He rolled up near the back and waited for the storm to pass, and he’s done it ever since. I cried the first time, resenting myself and my unruly self-control, and in the same thought, crippling thankfulness for refuge where we all can find it. I flashed to mine twelve years ago – the twinkle lights and candle shrine and cold, dark window seat. You could hear it still from the other room, the shouting, but you weren’t in the way and a room doesn’t care if you use it to hide sometimes. Plus, if you hum loud enough or fall asleep you mostly forget it’s there.

I’m not an all dog person in the whole manner that some claim to be. I’d like for them to be easily trained and unassuming, tender, careful, mildly excitable and really sad to see you leave. Maybe there’s some sort of universal personality pool that most dogs fall into by default, but whatever the case, we had winning numbers when we found ours. He is exactly as you need him to be a hundred percent of the time. He’s skilled in matching the energy of a room, empathetic as all get-out.

He displays a bit of social anxiety, but he’ll sure try until he can’t any longer. He plays hard by his own standards and sleeps harder. Always sleeps harder. He’s quickly concerned and wears my sadness when I’m sad. But when we jump around, you better believe that he jumps, too – ears pinned up, tongue out wide, and backside shaking all over the place. He feels everything we feel and carries what we carry, and I bet you he feels crazy like his mother, but what a gift that’s been to me to have him balance the load. It’s wild, isn’t it, how what serves as a gifting for one feels like the short straw for another. In this case, the one is my dog and the other is me.

I’m reading a book right now about burden-bearing and how to do it rightly. She speaks about spiritual sensitivity and this anointed ability to pick up on peoples’ pain, or a person’s pain. To not only feel for them, but feel with them, and to not just feel with them, but to take it from them and bear more of it so that they might bear less. The ones who naturally exhibit this often don’t know it, which leads to the conclusion that the way they were made to be is hopeless and inherently wrong. Tired all the time, bouts of irritability triggered by unwarranted events, likely withdrawn, and happier in the forest than in a crowded room. These unsuspecting victims latch onto the emotions of others and are responsible for doing something about it. And what was intended to help and relieve and intercede on the Spirit’s behalf has a tendency to get stuffed and stifled and thrown out with the cursed children. I’m a cursed child in the infant stages of a course correction, but I still catch myself wondering why me.

We have a friend from France who comes to town and lives with our family from time to time. Her last stint in Texas was three months long, and I got to take her into the city one of the days. On the road we talked again about culture differences, racial bias, and the generation gap. As she and I drew a bridge from Paris to here, she said something true and I’ve gone back to it a lot in this context. Conceptually, it seems as if the issues easiest to form our small opinions about are – universally – some of the toughest to articulate. To yoke our speech and our thinking more evenly (and respectfully), she says, we must be willing to change our language of hard things first. Are they actually hard or are they just misunderstood, misidentified, or mistaken? In order to change our coming thoughts on a matter, let’s make good their purpose on our tongues.

I want to thank her for saying that, because it’s teaching me inadvertently that a gift is a gift is a good gift whose meaning is tarnished if our well-meaning knowledge of it trails behind a sad, sorry-for-yourself song. And maybe it’ll take some aligning of what I know to be true of this certain gift and what I say is true of myself, but I can’t fairly throw one out without recognizing the other. The thing you’re sure you admire in your neighbor can’t possibly constitute the same chorus of why me’s along the way. I don’t know how long that could take, but if I’m lucky, something that normally feels like emotional upheaval and total burnout would snap its fingers and bow to its helpmate: a prayerful returning of a whole room’s brokenness back to where it came from.  

I’d also like to thank my dog for being him, because he’s borne enough of my burdens over the years for me to come around past envy, denial, and avoidance to finally say show me your ways. And maybe just as soon as those words start to materialize will I then begin to think of God’s gift as a good one. I’d really like to think of it as a good one.