If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

by Julia Sweeney

  I named him Pip. He proved to be unstable. He began to tear the house apart. He shredded Mulan’s diapers—while she was still wearing them. He shredded everything else in sight. You know how they say audiences sometimes have a sense that certain shows or movies will turn out to be stinkers before they even open? Maybe powerful big celebrities have the same instincts about dogs (something that I, a lower-level celebrity who is mostly recognized for being the friend of someone’s cousin, do not possess).

  I hired an expert to help me cope with having a baby and a puppy at the same time. The expert said I should wear a water pistol everywhere, day and night, as if I were in a dog western. Whenever the dog did something I didn’t like, I was to shoot water in his face. This dog was as small as a rat and moved just as quickly. I soon realized that I was not a good enough markswoman to hit the dog. My walls soon were stained with water and the dog seemed to be getting crazier and crazier.

  Feeling my desperation, my father agreed to take the dog. I took Pip to Spokane and gave him to my dad, along with a beautiful cage and ten dog-training sessions with a reputable Spokane trainer. After three months my father called me and said, “I’m very sorry, Julia, but I have to send Pip back to you. I cannot connect with Pip, and I’m not sure why, I love dogs, but this dog . . . I can’t manage to train him and yesterday I had an incident with him. . . .” My dad went on to tell me about the incident. You see, he was in declining health at this time, and he had an oxygen tank. Pip chewed through my dad’s oxygen tubes, repeatedly. Once while he was on the phone, one of those old-fashioned phones with a cord, Pip got the oxygen tubes tangled in the phone cord and almost asphyxiated my father. He said he felt like he was in a Warner Bros. cartoon and the dog was out to get him.

  My dad put Pip on a flight to Los Angeles. When I got him back, I made it my first priority to find him a new home. Fortunately, through a friend, I found a very wealthy couple who were willing to take the dog. They had a penthouse in Santa Monica with a wraparound terrace that looks out over the Pacific Ocean. The bottom line is that Pip lives better than you or I will ever live. Through my friend, I know that Pip is doted on. This was probably what Pip had in mind for himself all along.

  So maybe you can understand how not-into-getting-a-dog I was when this ugly beast arrived on my doorstep. I felt absolutely nothing for this dog. Marc and I decided to give him a bath. The dog was terrified of water, and he cried and scratched both of us a lot. He didn’t even look that much different after the bath.

  We took his picture and put up some posters around the neighborhood. One person called to yell at us: “Don’t you know that people take dogs to horrible dungeons where they are used in incredibly sadistic, painful experiments by evil scientists working for Procter and Gamble and they use posters like yours to find their victims?”

  Wow. No, I wasn’t aware of that. We promptly took down all our posters. No one else called us. It probably didn’t help that in the picture the dog looked like he was about to eat a small child. We both agreed he looked like the Big Bad Wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood,” only much shorter. The dog slept on the porch and eventually I let him in my backyard. I really should have known that was the beginning of the end.

  Marc agreed to see if this dog could get along with his two dogs, both elderly boxers. Our stray played with his female boxer. He also peed all over Marc’s house, on each piece of upholstered furniture—two or three times each—just to make sure his territory was indelibly marked. My neighbor’s wife put her foot down and marked hers. They were not taking this dog.

  We decided we had to name the dog something besides “the dog” or “this dog.” I was reluctant, thinking that a name would individualize the dog, lend it the illusion of a more appealing personality, or cause Mulan to want us to keep him. So far, Mulan hated the dog. If Mulan was walking from the kitchen to the dining room with a plate of food in her hands, the dog would walk next to her, throwing his hip into her thigh. This had the effect of throwing her off balance so that some of the food would fall off the plate onto the floor. Smart. And annoying.

  I did not let the dog sleep in the house; I only let him sleep in the backyard. One reason was that he did not get along well with my cat, Val. He wanted to eat her, and she did not want to be eaten. The doors to the house could no longer be open, and I had to be vigilant about keeping the dog and cat separated.

  At night, this dog would figure out things to do. One night he pushed my garbage cans toward the fence, climbed on top of them, and then jumped over the fence so he could play with Marc’s dogs. Smart, once again. But this is something I realized: You don’t want a smart dog. You want a dumb dog. You want a very dumb dog, one that just lies there and can’t figure much out. (I do not have this same attitude toward children. Yet, anyway.)

  In the meantime I was getting ready for my second adoption.

  Okay, now I have to tell you, I really thought it was criminal to have only one child. I still sort of feel this way now. In the very first interview with the social worker, I told her that I wanted to adopt a second child soon after the first one. I figured a kid needs another kid, so that when they’re adults they can say to each other, “Our mom is crazy, right?” Or, “I can’t handle Mom for Thanksgiving this year; you gotta take her.” As a single mom it was even more important to me that my child have another person in the world to be in her family.

  As soon as I got Mulan home from China I took the preliminary steps toward a second adoption. I wanted to adopt a boy and I knew there were two countries where it was easy for single Americans to adopt. One was Guatemala, and the other was Ethiopia.

  Each night I read either about Guatemala or Ethiopia. When I learned that African boys were at the absolute bottom of the list of in-demand adoptees, I chose Ethiopia. I paid for another home study and gathered all the financial and personal information to restart the process. I was about halfway through, knowing a child would be assigned to me within six months or so. So, you see, I couldn’t think about also adopting a dog at this time.

  Dogs require an enormous amount of attention and work, and they can cost a lot, too. Many of the people I knew, especially childless couples, had dogs that were the focus of their lives. What made me so judgmental about those people was this fact: the dog is never going to vote. Dog owners are putting all this energy and money and investment into an animal that will come close to requiring the same amount of energy, money, and emotional investment that people put into their kids and, in the end, the dog is never going to be a contributing member of society (at least in a participatory democracy), never going to discover anything (that you’d want to brag about), never going to further mankind’s quest for anything but squirrels, never do anything but flop around and drool all over themselves in admiration of the people who are housing them. Ten thousand years of symbiotic relationships between humans and canines and what do we have to show for it? Sit, stay, fetch, and poop bags on pocket-sized rolls. MORE KID, LESS DOG was my fantasy bumper sticker.

  I began to ask around to see who might want to adopt this dog. People wanted to know what type of dog he was. I resisted the impulse to say, “An old, bitter, not housebroken, pee-marking dog with scary yellow teeth and a bad temper, that’s what kind of dog.” Jeez. I became elaborately enraged at those who wanted to know what type of dog it was. I felt the same way about dogs as I do about kids: what difference does it make? It was a dog, a canine. If it was a kid I’d found, people wouldn’t want to know what race it was. Well, maybe they would, but they probably wouldn’t have the nerve to ask, and I wouldn’t have liked that, either.

  In any case, I figured I should take the dog to a vet to find out what the hell he was.

  The vet said the dog was a purebred.

  “What?” I said.

  “Yes, he looks like a blue heeler, which is an Australian cattle dog.”

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling more hostility toward this dog, now that he was a goddamn purebred. I got the dog his shots. The a
ssistant came in and insisted that I give a name to the dog. I really didn’t want to name the dog. Finally, I settled on naming him after the street we lived on: Arden. After all, it was already at the top of the form.

  While doing sit-ups at my gym, I started a conversation with the guy doing sit-ups next to me. He said he knew a guy with a cattle ranch in central California who used cattle dogs like Arden. I was thrilled. You see, it had become apparent that Arden needed an enormous amount of exercise. I had taken him on a couple of walks, but if he didn’t get the chance to go on at least an hour-long brisk walk every day, he became unmanageable. This seemed perfect. Cattle dogs are a working breed and that’s exactly what Arden needed: a job.

  “Your dog will think he died and went to hell if you bring him to me,” the cattle ranch guy barked into the phone. He described how he kept his dogs tied up all day, sometimes for three days at a time, and then they run the cows and he shoots little pellets at them to keep them herding the cattle. He said it would probably take at least two weeks to break Arden out of the cushy comfort zone he’d been lolling in at my Hollywood home.

  “Oh, he’s not that comfortable, I mean . . . he’s a stray,” I said. I glanced over at Arden, who was happily asleep on his back, sprawled over the expensive, big, cushy, overstuffed chair that Mulan and I used for reading books together. Arden rolled over a bit so his legs just hung out like he was at the end of a yoga class. A little drool made its way onto the arm cushion. “Uh, huh,” I said. “Well, I guess I need to think about that.”

  Okay, so Arden needed exercise. I found a dog park, called Runyon Canyon, which is right in the middle of the city. There’s a steep climb from the bottom of the canyon to the top, about a thousand feet in elevation. Once you’re inside the park, it’s all off-leash, which made the exercise much easier and more enjoyable for me. Plus there was a great reward of a view of the whole city when you got to the top. At first I would bring Mulan and carry her on my back in a backpack all the way up. When she turned four, she learned to hike the two and a half miles all by herself. We went daily. Daily.

  That’s when I figured I really had to quit my television-writing job.

  Wow, this dog was expensive.

  I still wasn’t all that into this dog, but I figured it was providence that had thrown us together. The first time I realized I had feelings for him was when I returned home from a long day away and Arden was so happy to see me that he peed all over himself and pretty much everything else in the vicinity of the front door. By this time I had convinced—er, trained—him not to pee in the house and he knew it was wrong, which made my heart break when I saw him trying to lick up his own urine. He so wanted to be a good, dry dog.

  I got accustomed to his face. I got used to his barking. I began to feel safer with him around.

  Mulan and I planned a trip to Spokane to see family. Now added to the grueling ritual of getting out of town was the hassle of taking Arden to a kennel. When I look back on it, I don’t know why I didn’t just say to my whole family, we will not be traveling until Mulan is older. But I wasn’t smart enough then to make things easier on myself. I’d pack up the car with Mulan and our suitcase, as well as the umbrella stroller and car seat, and Arden, along with his favorite things—his blanket, etc. We stopped at the kennel and dropped him off. Then I drove to airport short-term parking, where I put Mulan in the backpack I used to hike with her, and then put it on my back. Why? Because I couldn’t push her in a stroller and pull the suitcase at the same time. We went in and checked the suitcase. Then we would head back to the car, drive out of short-term parking, and into long-term parking. Then I would put Mulan in the small umbrella stroller, leaving the backpack in the car. Why not just take the backpack and not the stroller, you might ask? Because in Spokane I would need a stroller, not only for my use but for my parents’, too. I pushed the stroller, having strung the car seat across my back. (Strollers that doubled as car seats were too cumbersome for daily use and I never found any I liked.) I also carried my handbag/diaper bag. We got on the shuttle and off the shuttle. In and out of the umbrella stroller. The car seat straps flailing around. The kid often yelling. Can I just point out how many parts of this story require getting a toddler into and out of a strapped contraption? And this was all before we got to security. It was insane! At the time, however, I just felt proud I’d figured out how to do it on my own.

  When we got inside the airport, I saw a single mother I knew who had two adopted Chinese children. Her younger daughter was the same age as Mulan. She was pushing a piled-high cart from the check-in desk to the security area. One kid was on top of the luggage, and the other one was under her arm. She was all alone. We had met at various events held by Chinese Children Adoption International and I knew she also had animals at home. I didn’t say hello; I just observed her from a distance.

  And the sight of her overwhelmed me. She looked so tired. She looked like Sisyphus pushing that cart. I froze. I was transported out of time. I almost felt I was looking at my future self.

  I didn’t know that I was saying something out loud. I just felt my lips moving. It was as if they were some other part of me. I looked down at my lips. Why were they doing that and what were they saying? A silent shrill, a squeak seemed to be emanating from my mouth. Then I recognized the words I was saying: “I cannot have two children. I cannot have two children. I cannot have two children on my own. And a dog.”

  I canceled the Ethiopian adoption. I think if I’d already been assigned a specific child, I wouldn’t have called it off. But I felt I was still on the bubble, and I could still back out. It did feel wimpy. I’d spent my whole life up until then—really, I swear—never even thinking, “I cannot . . .” or “that’s too much.” I saw myself as infinitely capable. I could always add to my life.

  The dog had kicked my ass. The dog had thrown me against the wall. The dog was the straw, and the spine of my unlimited capacity for more was broken.

  But here’s the thing. Now I am firmly on the side of people with dogs. The great beauty of the dog is this: just when dogs get to be twelve or thirteen—generally, just when, if they were children, they would be scornfully demanding things from you (money, food, rides) while simultaneously telling you that you were full of shit, just at the cusp of the beginning of the agony, the dog dies. Okay, that in itself is not the beautiful thing, but I thought of it this way: Dogs have an evolutionarily refined ability to understand human gestures and vocal commands, but their brains never reach adolescence. They require a lot, but they don’t make demands that are steeped in derision. They do not mock their loving elders. They have no concept of sarcasm or irony, yet they can still be smart and funny. They are, in fact, grateful for every scrap you toss their way, and every moment of attention you give them.

  As the mother of a girl on the cusp of teendom, I now believe this dog is a beautiful thing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Big Strollers Are Bad

  . . . then comes baby in a baby carriage.

  —Traditional rhyme

  Nonhuman primates are hairy all over and their babies can cling to them by grabbing on to their fur. At some point along the human evolution superhighway, we lost almost all our body hair. There’s much debate about why we lost our hair, but I guess the leading theory is that our environment got very hot and dry and hair makes you warmer, and exposed skin can be cooled quickly with a minimum of perspiration. The other theory is that hairlessness reduced the infestations of bloodsucking lice, fleas, and ticks that promote disease. This theory posits that there was some kind of evolutionary bottleneck and the hairless people survived. I’ve heard scientists say that this may be one reason why the exposed hairless back is so sexually appealing to both sexes, in that it advertises the lack of lice.

  The fact is, we became naked apes. For babies and mothers, it presented a problem. Babies liked to grab on to the hair of the mother or adult caretaker and hang on. What to do with this naked mama? One solution, for the mother, was to stand u
p and carry the damn kid. It could even have been the need to carry offspring with arms that accelerated bipedalism. (For reasons I cannot explain very well, that word, bipedalism, always sounds to me like an uncontrollable desire to have sex with bicycles.)

  The bottom line is that, for at least a million years (which is how long it’s been since humans lost their hair), human mothers carried their children. This could have encouraged birth spacing because it’s difficult to carry more than one or two children at a time. It could have strengthened family ties because other adults could contribute by carrying a child. It probably even kept our ancestors fit, lean, and strong.

  Another thing that’s great about carrying your child is that you take up less space.

  I was thinking about this as I was jockeying for a view of one of the jellyfish tanks at the Shedd Aquarium here in Chicago. The tanks have rather small windows that are maybe six feet across. There are several tanks and in each one they have a startlingly beautiful species of jellyfish. But I could not enjoy the exhibit as I wished to, because everywhere I looked there were strollers in my way. Big strollers: super-wide, almost Hummer-like in their obnoxiousness, a veritable trailer for their precious cargo. Some of the strollers were at least three feet wide, taking up half the available space for viewing the jellyfish. The mothers appeared both oblivious and entitled. Their children were often too young or too checked out to even register what it was they were supposed to be looking at. Many were fast asleep.

  Worse, several of the mothers seemed exhausted and irritated, as if the problem was not their wide load of babydom but the rest of us people who were in the way. We were in the way of their precious baby’s view of a starfish. We all dutifully stepped aside and made way for them. I probably wouldn’t have felt pissy about doing this if junior had been over three months old and awake.