by Rory Kress
After a few months of our new routine, I came home from work one morning to find Izzie quietly crying in the playpen we’d attached to her crate. It was unlike her. Usually, she would at least pop up and paw at the gate when I’d come home—not out of excitement or happiness but rather as a means of acknowledging my existence and an end to her brief but solitary confinement with only the sound of WNYC’s Leonard Lopate to keep her company.
I drew closer to her and saw that there were small speckles of dried blood on her paws. I stepped cautiously into the playpen. She retreated into her crate. I tried to coax her toward me, even as she refused. I scratched her behind the ears and stroked her back, quietly cooing to her. Tentatively, she put one paw in front of the other and walked out of the crate and over to my lap. With a heavy puff, she sighed and laid her head—mouth open, tongue out, panting—onto my knee. There, inside, I could see that two tiny teeth were bent at near ninety-degree angles to her bleeding gums. They were ready to fall out in place of her adult teeth to come. She lay there, head voluntarily poised on my lap for the very first time, and waited for me to help. Carefully, knowing all too well her purposeful and sharp warning nips that it seemed she reserved only for me and not Dan, I worked my fingers into her mouth and gently jostled the teeth from their place and into the palm of my hand.
“You’re okay,” I whispered as she let me kiss the top of her head for the very first time. She smelled like my shampoo. Izzie whimpered, still frightened to find the tools she most trusted wobbling around impotent inside her. “See?”
I held out my hand and showed her the teeth. Her nose bobbed up and down on the end of her snout as she sniffed the things that had just come from inside her. And she stayed with me for what felt like a very long time.
Now, years later, our lives are intertwined, and I would sooner cut off my own hand than let her go. It’s only taken half a decade—even longer in dog years—but finally, I’ve surpassed Dan in Izzie’s eyes. I’m very proud to say that I’m her favorite now. Dan is only a little bitter about his reversal of fortune, accusing me of having Stockholmed her. But I sometimes have nightmares about those first days still and try, every day, to do penance for my terrible, early dog-parenting mistakes—for my willingness to toss her aside like a defective toy.
I wonder if Izzie remembers that day that she lost her first teeth. I wonder if somewhere in the back of her bestial brain, she sees that moment as the beginning of us too. I wonder if all the thousands of miles of walks, the hundreds of illicit snacks I’ve snuck her under the table, the hours I’ve slept holding her close in our bed have all been built on that first moment we learned to trust each other.
Five years after that first moment of bonding, our lives were beginning to look very different. Dan and I had married, and we’d long since packed our bags to move out west to Denver. Izzie was enjoying on-demand access to our fenced yard and the dog park at the lake at the end of the block. We were spending our summers hiking up fallow ski slopes as Izzie blazed ahead, traipsing through waves of wildflowers. I’d even managed to voice-train her to walk safely off leash as we’d romp through dense trees and creeks. Somehow, we’d turned our neurotic Brooklyn puppy into a confident, Colorado mountain dog.
But Dan and I were also gearing up for fertility treatments and preparing to make some of the most challenging personal, physical, and financial decisions of our life together. With just a few weeks to go before starting the IVF process, I started to feel sick. But sick in a different way than I ever had before.
It was January, and we were in Boca Raton, visiting Dan’s grandparents, Ema and Zaida. Izzie was spread-eagle on the floor by Zaida’s feet, sleeping off the kugel and salami we’d begged them not to feed her. Zaida could never help himself. It’s a Jewish dog! he’d always exclaim in his thick accent, as if it were her birthright to enjoy large hunks of Hebrew National. He was born on a dairy farm in Poland before having to flee the war and so had always kept a lifelong soft spot for animals—especially Izzie. He loved to get her riled up and watch her scamper around, barking back at him until she would collapse beside him on a couch with her tongue flopped completely out of her mouth.
Dan and I were bumming around on the couch, watching daytime TV blasting at elderly-person volume levels, also trying to sleep off the haze of kugel and salami on a balmy Floridian afternoon. I texted Dan as he was sitting next to me so no one else would know.
pharmacy run?
we should get a test
Dan just looked at me, puzzled. I shrugged. Worst came to worst, it would break our lazy spell and get us out of the house into the fresh air for the first time that day.
Off we went, certain we’d be wrong, certain it was impossible. We bought a box of tests, and I hustled off to the bathroom to take the first one alone. I thought it would be so obvious, so black-and-white. But when the timer ran out and the answer was right there in front of me, I didn’t understand. I held it to the light. There it was, barely visible on the tiny white window, the faintest pink line I’d ever seen. I ran to get Dan, my face giving nothing away as I didn’t even know what it meant. We locked ourselves in the bathroom and squinted at the stick. Could this really count? I took three more immediately, all with the same ambiguous result.
“There would be no second line there at all if it were negative,” he said, using the special voice he has when discussing matters of science, as if his abandoned premed track in college means that he has special expertise in the workings of pregnancy tests.
“But it’s barely there. Like, you have to squint and hold it to the light to see it.”
“Barely there is still there. There’s a line there. That’s a positive test.”
I made him vow not to tell Ema and Zaida. I didn’t want to break their hearts when this inevitably failed. This was just a line, not a baby.
But with the dozens of tests I repeated in the coming days and weeks at a frenzied pace, that faint pink line got darker and darker. My head was spinning. Most days, I repeated it several times a day. Each time, that second line got darker, and presumably, I got more pregnant. It couldn’t be. Me, IVF clinic reject, pregnant? We told no one and began the hunt for an obstetrician. We rescheduled our appointments with the fertility clinic, pushing them back by a month or two, sure we’d still have to go anyway when this whole pregnancy thing inevitably fell through.
But it didn’t. The pregnancy stuck, and every day that passed, I breathed just a tiny bit easier that I might go the distance on this thing. It helped that the obstetrician we ultimately found was more of a prenatal cheerleader than a doctor.
“Wow! How cool is that?” he exclaimed at my first ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy, only six weeks along. With three decades of delivering babies under his belt, he still gushed like it was the very first blurry dot on a sonogram he’d ever seen in his career. I was vulnerable and scared enough to buy it. “That right there is textbook. That’s exactly how we want it to look. Amazing!”
But despite my doctor’s confidence, I couldn’t fully shake my certainty that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. We were told this was impossible by some of the most respected experts in their field. So why should we dare to doubt them?
“Can we, you know, tell anyone?” I asked the doctor, hoping a new professional opinion could banish the fears imposed by those from the very recent past.
“Yes,” he said warmly. “Go tell your families.”
We packed our bags and Izzie’s too and booked a trip back to our hometown of Philadelphia to see our families and tell them in person. But how could we tell them?
We’ve all seen the viral videos of pregnancy announcements or the maternity photo shoots. In them, the woman always looks so confident holding her belly, so sure that everything is going to be just fine and that there will be a baby in her arms at the end of the journey. That wasn’t me. We’d been to so many doctors and had had so many disappointments. The whole thing felt unreal. It didn’t feel honest to talk about this invisible fo
rce inside of me like it was going to become a person at the end of nine months. It wasn’t a baby. It wasn’t a little boy or a little girl. It wasn’t even a fetus yet. It just was an idea, and a crazy one at that. Something I couldn’t see or touch. Something too fragile to be real. To even utter the possibility now flowing into our lives filled me with terror, as if it could end everything we were hoping would be real and permanent and life-altering. I didn’t have it in me at this point to say the words I’m pregnant. I couldn’t even say those words to myself.
On the ground in Philadelphia, I gathered my parents in the formal living room they never use.
“Izzie has a new trick she wants to show you,” I said, two heartbeats inside of me but only mine pounding loud enough to throb in my ears.
“That dog can barely give a paw,” my mother said, already bored by the prospect of having to pay Izzie any more attention than she already does. She likes Izzie well enough but finds our love of the dog indulgent, excessive, and annoying—at best.
“Well, this is a new trick, and I think you’ll really like it,” I promised, not having anticipated resistance. “Hang on. I gotta get the prop.”
“Props?” my mother wailed. “This trick has props? Kill me now.”
I ran off to put on Izzie’s tiny T-shirt, custom fit to her long, skinny body. She looked at me skeptically. She hates wearing anything, even a leash.
“Just for a minute,” I promised, kissing her between the eyes for reassurance, then sending her back into the living room.
She came scurrying out across the slippery wood floors like a cockroach, tucking her tail, fighting the shirt on her back.
“What’s it say?” my parents asked, leaning in for a closer look at the writing on the shirt. “Shhhh, I have a secret. Rub my tummy to find out,” they read in near-perfect unison.
Dan and I exchanged nervous glances.
They complied and bent down to give Izzie the most important belly rub of our lives. She rolled onto her back, and there it was, written on the front of the shirt: I’m going to be a big sister!
My dad looked at me with terror. “You’re getting another dog?”
We’d actually expected that that’s what they’d guess first—that says a lot about us, perhaps.
“No,” my mom said, her eyes welling up. Then she started screaming, the happiest sound I’ve ever heard from her.
I pulled the blurry ultrasound picture from my pocket.
“Really?” she asked, her voice begging it to be true.
“Did you do this all by yourself?” my dad asked.
“Well, Dan helped.” I shrugged.
But he was really asking if we’d somehow snuck in a round of IVF without updating them that we’d gone through it. We told him we hadn’t, not that it mattered. Now, as improbable as it was, we just had to hope it would stick.
After the crying and hugging and several other rather impertinent questions, my mother gave Izzie—now freed from the bonds of her T-shirt—a loving rub on the head.
“That was a very good trick, Izzie. Your best yet,” she said. “But once baby comes, just you wait. They’re going to forget all about you!”
Impossible. Baby or no baby, Izzie is irreplaceable, and our bond is unique among all others in my life. As I grow with the baby inside of me, it becomes very clear to me: Izzie is not our child. But that doesn’t mean we love her less or will forget about her when the baby comes, because a baby cannot take her place. Izzie is a silent sister, a loyal friend, as much a part of me as a limb.
The counting in weeks becomes counting in months and then trimesters. Soon enough, I don’t need to learn to utter the words I’m pregnant; my body tells people for me. My daily five-mile hikes with Izzie get whittled down to four, then three, then slow waddles around the block. Where she used to mush ahead, dragging me through the streets by her supposedly antipull harness, now she walks by my side, glancing up at me frequently as we go. As much as I’ve changed with this pregnancy, so has she, it seems.
But for all the surprise and joy at finding we were pregnant in the first place, the challenges with making it through have become a way of life. Every night, I wake at 3:00 a.m. and can’t get back to sleep. Izzie hears me stirring and yawns from her bed on the other side of the room. She knows what I’m thinking in the silent darkness. I grab my iPad and pillow and waddle out of bed. She’s waiting for me. I open the door, and she’s off, scanning the halls, clearing the way like a celebrity bodyguard as we decamp to the guest room.
In the quiet of our own private bedroom, with no fear of disturbing my sleeping husband, we toss and turn and make Netflix really earn that monthly subscription fee, binge-watching whatever appeals to us until we can pass out. If I get lucky enough to fall asleep first, Izzie slinks to the foot of the bed so that her violent jerks and jabs when dreaming don’t whack me in the face or belly.
When you’re pregnant and you’re notorious among family and friends for letting your dog be the center of your world, people like to ask: Is the dog getting jealous yet? My own mother, visiting us just a couple of months before my due date, looks at Izzie yet again with pitying eyes.
“You are going to be so lonely,” she coos, cradling Izzie’s crusty muzzle in her hands. “They’re going to forget all about you.”
Other mothers like to recount stories of how their dogs reacted to their pregnancies, either growing protective or envious. One neighborhood mom tells me how her beloved Lab lunged at her newborn with rage in its eyes when she brought her eldest daughter home from the hospital. She had to give the dog up to childless relatives in another city after the incident. My sister-in-law gives us a book on how to prepare the dog for the baby so that everyone is safe and happy. But paging through it, all I find are horror stories of the worst possible scenarios: the toddler who stuck his hand in the dog’s bowl and nearly lost it when the territorial creature bit down in retaliation.
So far, I’m not worried about Izzie. She’s always loved children—perhaps too much. She’s got a nasty habit of darting across the street when she hears one of my neighbor’s little girls calling her name. She stares deep into their eyes and leans against their unstable toddler frames as they pet her and try to grab at her frenetic nub of a tail. My pregnancy doesn’t factor into much of Izzie’s daily routine. She hasn’t grown more needy or more protective. She’s not withdrawn, sullen, or jealous. If there’s any change, she seems only to be more patient and deferential—a shocking transformation from a fiercely independent beast like she is. Well, and maybe she’s gotten a little lazy now that we’ve dramatically downsized our daily hikes.
But there is one thing that has become suddenly apparent to us as we confront our futures with the permanent and awe-inspiring responsibility ahead of us. If everything goes according to the natural order, we will be parents to this baby for the rest of our lives. There will never come a day that we have to live when our child does not. We will perhaps be gone as this baby, once grown, moves forward with a life and new family without us.
But to have a dog is to know and anticipate a different kind of sadness and longing. It means knowing that, in all likelihood, we will have to live without Izzie one day. We will have to watch how time moves mercilessly faster for her than for us, her spark fading and her health declining until we bear witness as she leaves this world. She’s the only dog we’ve ever known. With this pregnancy, the fact that one day we will have to part with her suddenly becomes reality in a way I had never before considered. It’s as if until now, we’ve been living in a fantasy world where she’s going to be around forever—our unchangeable little family unit.
While other mothers might imagine their child’s first day at school or first time riding a bike, I imagine the day our little one will start bonding with Izzie. When we learn that this baby is going to be a boy, the picture gets clearer. I see our son taking his first steps with one hand on her back for balance. I can see them running through the neighborhood, chasing after the local chicken
that roams up and down the block, and seeking grand adventures that I will never be a part of. It fills me with both joy and sadness to think that then, Izzie won’t be my dog anymore; she will belong to my son, and she will love him more than anything else until the day she is gone. I can only hope she stays for many years, long enough to find a permanent place in his memory and his imagination, so that he will always remember her with as much love as I will. And maybe that’s how she will live on forever: eternally joyful and free in our son’s happiest, earliest, safest memories.
But for now, Izzie is still here. She’s lying between Dan and me in the bed, her back pressed to my giant belly. I feel myself losing my grip as I look at her sleeping on her own paws.
“Someone should have warned me,” I tell my husband, trying desperately not to cry. “No one told me that I shouldn’t let myself love her so much.”
“Too late,” he says.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We Can’t Ignore the Doggie in the Window
It’s a singsong tune we all know: a lilting voice delivering the simple story of a woman in a pet shop seeking a dog to keep her lover company as she travels to California. “How much is that doggie in the window?” Patti Page asks in her now-classic 1952 novelty tune as dogs pleasantly yapped to the beat. It was an undeniable hit, selling two million copies and spurring a spike in registrations for the American Kennel Club.
Today, the song’s innocent tone describing a visit to the friendly neighborhood pet shop rings false. So much so that even Patti Page changed her tune. In 2008, she teamed up with the Humane Society to record a new version of the hit, called “Do You See that Doggie in the Shelter?” Instead of inquiring after the “one with the waggly tail,” now Page asked for “the one with the take-me-home eyes.”
She explained her reason for distancing herself from her most famous hit song more than half a century after it climbed to the top of the charts.
