Pack of Two

by Caroline Knapp

  An hour or so later, the two of us having railed at each other for a good long time, I went off for a walk by myself and wound up back at the same spot where I’d made the initial comment. I sat on a rock, Lucille by my side, and I looked out over the farmland and the lake, and I panicked, panicked with the singular brand of dread and uncertainty that hits when you see your life at a crossroads, one path leading in a familiar direction and one path leading someplace entirely new and uncharted. I suppose it’s safe to say that I’d already contemplated leaving the relationship for some time, that my difficulty in sharing Lucille with Michael had already spoken volumes about my view of us as a pack, but I’d always framed the issue in somewhat narrow and specific terms, the focus placed rather squarely on him: Do I want to be with him, could I have children with him, could I live with him? What are his strengths and limitations? That afternoon, facing what felt like the real possibility of life without Michael for the first time, I suppose I had to broaden that focus, to open it up, to look not just at who Michael was and what he might or might not be able to provide but at who I was, and what kind of a life I might or might not want to live.

  I watched Lucille, who was ambling along the rocks, poking her nose into this crevice and that one, and I thought about kids. Like most women, I grew up simply assuming I’d have them, taking the matter pretty much for granted: you’re female, so at some point the right guy sails in and you settle down and you have children. In fact, I’ve never had so much as a tingle of maternal desire, at least not toward children. When we were in our twenties, my sister used to talk about how her whole body seemed to be screaming to have a baby, how every cell in her was agitating for it, telling her it’s time, do it, get pregnant, now. Me, I’ve always melted at the sight of a puppy, but I can’t ever remember having that feeling toward a baby, not even once. For a long time I worried about this—was I missing some key procreative gene? did I pickle away my maternal instincts during all those years of drinking?—but I also figured the desire would come in time, get washed up on the same elusive tide that washed up the right man, that I’d want a baby as soon as I found someone I wanted to have a baby with.

  Sitting there on that rock, I realized that I might never experience that kind of gut-level longing for a baby, that it just might not be part of my makeup, that having a child—or even wanting one—would require a shift in orientation so massive and fundamental it would necessitate something like a wholesale personality change.

  I love taking care of the dog. There is no question that she satisfies some brand of maternal feeling in me, that I take a great deal of pleasure in being able to provide for and nurture her. But even when I’m carting around bags of toys and blankets for her, even when I’m down on my knees cooing at her or imploring her to eat her supper, there is no question in my mind that she is a dog and not a baby, that the kind of care I give her is very different from the kind of care one gives an infant or a toddler, that the sacrifices and rewards I experience are wholly different from the sacrifices and rewards of motherhood. Janet, the ER nurse who owns the yippy Pomeranian-terrier mix named Kim, stated the difference very simply: “You can’t put a baby in a crate, toss in a couple of Milk-Bones, and go shopping for four hours. This distinction has never been lost on me.” Indeed. The dog owners I know may put a lot of time into dog care, but we certainly don’t log the kinds of hours that mothers of children do: no middle-of-the-night feedings, no crying jags on the dog’s part, no temper tantrums, and—our own devotion and intensity aside—nowhere near the range or volume of worries. “I love kids,” says Barbara, single and thirty-five, owner of a cocker spaniel named Joelle. “But let’s face it. Your dog isn’t going to turn to you as soon as he hits adolescence and scream at you that he hates your guts.” Right again: dogs may represent the one relationship in a human’s life where the potential for chaos actually diminishes over time. You don’t have to worry about whether the dog will get into a good preschool, or how you’ll pay for his college education; you don’t have to imagine the dog showing up one day with a mohawk or a substance abuse problem, and you can live in certainty that the dog will never crash the family station wagon into a tree.

  I thought about that from my perch in the Green Mountains, too. I thought: If I worry this much about a dog—if I’m this caught up with her, this prone to projection, this concerned with her health and safety and emotional well-being—just imagine how I’d be with children; I’d have to keep them in a plastic bubble until they turned thirty-five. I’m not sure I have the capacity for distance, for loving detachment, for whatever it takes to let go of the parental leash. I’m also not sure I have the patience, or the stamina, or the enormous selflessness that parenthood requires, and I’m not sure I could tolerate the trade-offs and the million daily compromises it involves. “You feel different when it’s your own baby.” People always say that, that the requisite degrees of commitment and love and patience and selflessness just well up in you as soon as you’re staring into the eyes of your own child (my own mother, who experienced the same lack of maternal flicker when she was in her twenties, used to say it), but I’m not so sure I want to find that out, not so sure I want whatever levels of commitment and love and selflessness I have within me to be directed toward a baby in the first place.

  Teasing out the voices: that phrase came to me as I sat there. Here I am trying to tease out these voices in my head. The self-deprecating voice is loud, sometimes merciless: I’m somehow not good enough to be a mom, it says; I’m not equipped for it, not sufficiently selfless or well adjusted. This is the voice of our culture, the voice of our parents, the voice of 25 million child-rearing American couples, and its words are very clear: noble, normal folks have kids; selfish, screwed-up ones don’t. Against the roar of that message, I think I’ve always heard another voice, tiny and tentative as a whisper, a mere thread of feeling inside that’s said: But wait, I’m not sure I want that, not sure that’s really the right path for me, not sure that’s where my energy and talents would be best directed. Something about the dog, something about having her and loving her and caring for her, has given life to that whisper, made it clearer and more audible. I looked at her and thought: There are many ways to be nurturant in this life, many ways to be generative and loving. I thought about a slightly catty bumper sticker I once saw and secretly admired: CHILDREN ARE FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T HAVE DOGS. I thought: Perhaps, for me, this is enough.

  Enough: that old, familiar question about what’s enough. I called the dog over to me, and scratched her on the chest, and thought about our daily rituals: the way she pads up the stairs beside me every morning when I head into my office to work; the way she bolts to attention when I turn the computer off; the little games we play—a set of high-tens, a little chase around the living room—before we set off on our afternoon outing. I thought about the exquisitely simple joy of meeting her exquisitely simple wants: handing her a rawhide stick, which to her is the equivalent of a drug; presenting her with a new toy; providing her with exercise and sustenance and affection and companionship. And I thought, with a combination of relief and great surprise: Well, yes, in fact, for now this may be enough; at last, this feels like enough.

  One of the great surprise bonuses of my entry into the world of dogs has been the discovery that plenty of other women have had the same experience: in the great should-I-or-shouldn’t-I conundrum around children, dogs can provide a missing piece of the internal puzzle. Sometimes a dog will tug a woman toward the yes-I-should side of the equation. (“I didn’t know I had it in me, this ability to bond and love, until I got the dog,” says Amy, a thirty-seven-year-old editor, whose earlier indifference about children has given way to a more concrete longing for them.) Sometimes a dog will have the opposite effect. (From Sandy, forty, a lawyer, self-described control freak, and owner of two standard poodles: “Infancy and breast-feeding and up all night? No thanks. I barely made it through puppyhood.”) And sometimes a dog will fill the gaps—and quite ably—while
a woman waits for time and circumstance and her own heart to pull her one way or another. (“I’d love to have kids someday,” says Kathy, twenty-nine, owner of a springer spaniel named Milo. “But for now I’m perfectly happy being a dog mom.”)

  Like me, all of these women are single and devoted to their dogs. Like me, none of them are confusing their dogs with human children. And like me, all of them resent the implication that there’s an element of sublimation at work, that the time and emotional energy they spend on their dogs represents a deflected wish for children. Amy finds the idea ridiculous: “I love kids and I love dogs, but come on: they’re completely separate.” Sandy finds it sexist: “Do men with dogs get accused of this? Can you imagine seeing a guy walk across a field with his German shepherd and having your first association be, ‘Oh, he’s obviously sublimating his biological need to procreate into that dog’?” Sandy laughs out loud at the idea, then grows more sober. “What I really resent,” she says, “is the idea that there is only one way for a woman to make a contribution in her lifetime, by having kids.” She herself is a paragon of giving: works extremely hard for her clients, does regular pro bono work, supports half a dozen social causes, maintains an equal number of close friendships, and, as she puts it, loves her dogs to death: “So where’s the sublimation?” she asks. “These dogs aren’t my kids. They’re my friends. They’re my fun. I love taking care of them. I love how happy they are when I walk in the door. I love having them in my room with me when I go to sleep at night. I love watching them eat Do I sound like a mother? No, I sound like a woman who loves her dogs.”

  Well, truth be told, she sounds like both: a woman who loves her dogs in a doting, smitten, maternal way, the same way I love Lucille. A lot of dog owners I know employ that style—verbal and cooing and affectionate—but does that make our dogs a substitute for human children? If motherhood is seen as a biological imperative or a symbol of normalcy or a necessary rite of passage, then perhaps, I suppose so. But if it’s seen as a choice, stripped of judgment, then no: the dog is simply—and blessedly—the dog.

  And yet man cannot live by dog alone. The panic I felt as I sat there on that rock in the Green Mountains had less to do with the possibility of not having children than it did with the possibility of not having a partner, of leaving the man with whom I’d shared seven very defining years, of choosing to be alone.

  This is something I’ve never really done before, chosen to be alone. I’ve been alone because men have dumped me, and I’ve been alone because I’ve dumped men, and I’ve been alone (a lot) with my various addictions, holed up at home over the years in order to drink in secret or to starve in secret or simply to avoid being out in the world with other humans. But all those stretches of solitude have felt impermanent and involuntary, marked by great strains of longing, as though I was merely biding time, waiting for my life to begin, waiting for some great elusive external to come along—new job, new man, sudden personality change—and alter everything, give my life meaning miraculously and immediately, just like that. There is enormous passivity to that brand of solitude, that kind of waiting and waiting and waiting, and there is a profound form of misplaced hope behind it, a belief that change and happiness and solace are things that simply happen to you, that they come from the outside in, little flukes of luck or circumstance or twists of fate that simply descend from the heavens with no agency or determination on your part, nothing deliberate about them.

  So I contemplated deliberation, choices. Life without Michael. Life without a partner. Self-definition without a man and without parents and without white wine, glasses and glasses of it firmly in hand. I sat there and I thought: What would I do? I meant that in the most specific and literal sense: Without Michael, without a boyfriend around whom to plan evenings and weekends and vacations, how would I spend my time? How would I fill the hours? Left to my own devices—left with my own barely understood needs and fears and longings—what foods would I eat, and what activities would I find to occupy myself, and who would I spend time with, and how lonely would I feel, and how bad could things get, and who in the midst of all that—just who, in the end—would I turn out to be? A strong person or a fragile one? Passive or powerful, social or solitary, capable of caring for myself or inept, balanced or crazy or what? I sat there in the mountains, and I thought: I’m thirty-six years old, and I still have no clear answers to those questions. I thought: It’s time to start. And then I thought: The dog, at least I have the dog, thank God for the dog.

  Lucille as companion. Lucille as agent of structure, the being who’d get me out of the house each morning and night, out to the woods each weekend. And Lucille as a kind of guide dog, the creature who’d be by my side as I began to create another kind of life for myself, to look at what it might mean to create a life in the first place.

  Michael and I returned from Vermont at the end of July, then decided to spend August apart, a kind of trial separation. August led to September; September led to couples therapy; couples therapy led, by Christmas, to a more final decision to part. Did I leave him for the dog, or because of the dog? Not really. Was I able to leave him because her presence, and the joy and comfort she provides, made me feel safe enough to move on? More likely.

  But questions linger, primarily about isolation. The dog may have helped me get out of a relationship, but could she ever help me get in one? Or have I found in her some kind of alternative to adult intimacy, a less complex and demanding way of living with another being?

  A few months after Michael and I split up, I had a long conversation about this with a woman in San Francisco named Ros, a journalist who lives with a five-year-old dalmatian-Lab mix named Digby. Digby is Ros’s Lucille—beloved animal, primary relationship, center of her universe—and like me, Ros organizes a good chunk of her life around the dog: hates leaving the dog alone, spends most of her free time with the dog, has cut way back in the four years since she’s had her on non-dog activities, like movies and dining out. So she wonders about the question of surrogacy, too. Ros, single and approaching forty when we talked, asked aloud: “Should I be concentrating on having better relationships with people? Is my relationship with the dog just sort of holding things up, helping me avoid venturing out into the human world?” For the most part, she thinks: No, the relationship with Digby feels like an enormously healthy and sustaining force in her life, probably the healthiest relationship she’s got going, but the worry gnaws at her periodically, creeps up in moments of worry that I understand completely because I share them.

  Sometimes, at the end of the day when I bolt that door behind me, take my deep breaths, and acknowledge just how much fear I lug around, I can see that my relationship with Lucille does have the quality of a retreat, a sanctuary where I’m temporarily eased of the burden of grown-up, human interactions. Sometimes, when I’m turning down an invitation to do something human (a dinner, a movie), I can feel it, can feel myself casting a vote for solitude, surrendering to my own need for safety. Easier to be with the dog. Just want to stay home with the dog. That’s when the questions bubble up: If I spent less time with the dog, would I have better, richer, deeper relationships with people? Would I be (gasp!) dating? Am I shielding myself from some other kind of experience here? Where, in the end, is the line between self-protection and self-limitation?

  I don’t think there are clear or easy answers to those questions. Right around the time I spoke to Ros, I had coffee with a woman named Marjorie, sixty-five, a recently retired school administrator who has lived with border collies for the last thirty years. Marjorie has never married or had children, so she has spent a lot of time contemplating the question of surrogacy, wondering about that same line.

  At the moment, Marjorie is sharing her life with a two-year-old border collie named Cory, who is sprightly and agile and, true to his breed, extremely intense, equipped with a blend of concentrated energy and focus that’s startling if you’re not used to it: throw Cory a ball, and he’ll dash after it as though his very li
fe depends on the retrieval, then careen back to you, drop the ball at your feet, stand there, and stare at you, front legs splayed, head tucked low, his whole body quivering in anticipation: throw the ball, throw the ball, do it again, do it again, please do it again. Marjorie is very attached to Cory, doting and adoring—“He’s turning out to be an extremely satisfying dog,” she says—but if you ask her to talk about what it’s like to love a dog profoundly, she will tell you about her first dog, a border collie named Glen whom she acquired when she was thirty-three.

  “Glen,” she says. “From the day I got that dog, we were absolutely together. We were just a perfect match: it was like, I don’t know—a foot in a shoe. I sometimes thought of him as my other half, or my alter ego.” Glen apparently felt the same way: when Marjorie went to work, he’d periodically escape from the house and literally track her down, navigating his way across two towns and several heavily trafficked roadways before materializing outside her office; he couldn’t bear to be separated from her. Marjorie says she hasn’t had such an intense relationship since, with a person or with another dog. “I hesitate to say this,” she said, “but I think in some ways Glen was like my husband—not in a sexual way, obviously, but emotionally. And I think the relationship was so intense that it satisfied me—it satisfied a great need to love something and to be loved—and to some extent I didn’t need anyone else. I just plunged into my relationship with him. I didn’t hold back at all.”

  Glen lived to be fifteen years old; he died when Marjorie was forty-eight, and was succeeded by four more border collies: first Kate, who was Glen’s daughter; then a pair named Bobby and Jamie; and now Cory, her current dog. Marjorie is a lively, genial woman with a wonderfully robust laugh, the kind of person who projects great vim and extroversion but is actually quite private, shy, and self-conscious. When she’s with a group of people, particularly people she doesn’t know well, she has a hard time turning off the voices of self-criticism, the harsh judgments: is she smart enough, is she adequate? Oh, you jerk; you sound like such a jerk: that’s the kind of thing she hears in her head, a burden that’s blessedly absent when she’s at home with a dog. Social skills and social confidence, like muscles, atrophy when they’re underused, so part of this is circumstantial: Marjorie has lived alone since she was twenty-nine, and she’s simply fallen out of the habit of being in social situations, forgotten how to be comfortable with small talk and easy conversation. But she also worries that her reclusiveness runs deeper than that, that it speaks to some darker failure on her part.