Last week I surrendered my dog to the shelter where I adopted him. It was difficult. It was heartbreaking. I changed my mind about it a dozen times on the ten-minute drive over to the shelter. At times, I briefly imagined some future cartoonish jailbreak… One in which I bust in to the shelter armed with a bandoleer of jerky treats and pull-toys. In my best action hero voice I’m screaming, “I’m coming for you buddy…” Maybe a tiny Lhasa Apso comes wandering up with her tail wagging hoping to be rescued, and I punt her out of the way. I kick down every rusty iron prison cell door. I push past and knock over an old and feeble sheep dog who looks like a wise mop. Remember, I said cartoonish… Of course, there won’t be any rescue and the shelter is much nicer than some Siberian prison – but as I loaded the car and drove him over (and for weeks before) I wanted the right to change my mind.
I dropped my dog off at noon (I know I need to change my language – he’s no longer my dog). I spent much of that morning sulking around the house. I welled up as I packed his things. I welled up when I sat on the floor next to him. I welled up when he was excited for the car ride and when he hung his unsuspecting meatball head out the window – he loves car rides. He’s a good dog…. I was sad when I saw him looking out the window of the shelter at me. I nearly lost it when the shelter manager asked if I wanted a few more minutes with him – I could barely utter the words, “no, it’s best if I just leave.”
I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about the complicated relationship I’ve had with my dog. In many ways, I saw our relationship as emblematic of all relationships and the ways we can love someone while also thinking they are the biggest pain in our ass. My particular hang-up was that I often saw my relationship with my dog as a metaphor for the relationship I had with my ex-fiancee – one in which she was the pet owner and I was the dog. My dog was needy. I was needy. My dog was often in my space. I was in her space. Sometimes, I wanted a break from my dog. Sometimes she would ask for time away from me.
Those parallels continued as I said goodbye and left him behind. It’s not that I didn’t love my dog. I did – very much so. And it’s not that I didn’t try to think of a million scenarios in which it would/could work. I did that too. I spent weeks going back and forth between thinking I can make this work and thinking there’s no way I can make this work. In the better moments of my mental wrangling, I almost liked the notion of us struggling to make it work. We’d have an “it’s just you and me kid against the world” moxie. But in the more pessimistic moments of my wrangling, I would envision him attacking another dog, or being difficult to manage on crowded city streets, or how limited my life would be if I continued to care for him on my own. I don’t know if the ex went back and forth – I only know she probably felt (much like I did) that leaving was the only solution, or that she couldn’t live the life she wanted had she stayed.
Every relationship, I think, involves levels of compromise, commitment, and a continual shifting and re-examination of one’s desires and expectations. We learn, we change, we grow, we shrink… We enter into relationships expecting them to go a certain way. If we can pull back and take the long view, we might see that at any given moment in the relationship, we are only experiencing a small slice of its dynamic nature. Give it a few days, a month, a year, or several years and it will likely look different. As our partners change and as we change, as we reveal more of ourselves to each other, we frequently find ourselves asking variations of the question, “is this still what I want? is this what I’ve signed up for? am I still excited about where we’re going?”
One of the things, among many, that made surrendering the dog hard was that it triggered a few of my bigger internal conflicts: trying to live without expectations; accepting things as they are; practicing long-term patience; and the notion that love and duty, when properly linked, can conquer all. Giving the dog up meant giving up on the relationship I thought he and I would have. It meant giving up on the dog I thought he could be. It meant accepting that I knew our circumstances would change, maybe get better, but I wasn’t willing or able to wait it out. It meant accepting a more complicated and nuanced understanding of love and duty – one in which those two things alone might not be enough to make it work.
Elsewhere on this blog I’ve quoted Anne Lamott, “expectations are resentments under construction.” I’m a firm believer that our expectations (desires) can often lead to disappointments and resentments. I also believe that, when not held too tightly, those same expectations and desires can put us in the vicinity of joy – can give us something that looks a little like hope or at least something to strive for. When I adopted the dog, my expectations of what life with him would be like were shaped by my experience of living with another dog, an older and more easy-going pit bull, and by this touching article I had read in the New York Times. I imagined road trips and play dates and chilling at patio bars. I imagined always being able to say “he’s friendly” when other dogs approached. I don’t know that we would have ever gotten to that point.
I reread the article after surrendering my dog. It made me feel just as sappy and sad as it did the first time I read it. It made me still want that type of companionship. What challenged me this time was the author’s quote from The Little Prince: “You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” That kinda gets to the heart of things, right? It makes me wonder if our underlying desire is to “tame” things? We tell ourselves that we don’t want to be controlled and we don’t want to be controlling, yet we walk through the world trying to bend everything to our will. And while we often take responsibility for those people and things we bring into our orbit, we feel tremendous shame when we can’t honor those obligations and hurt when others can’t meet their obligations to us. We tell ourselves things like, “if they really cared, they’d behave differently” and forget the times when maybe we cared and still behaved in ways that suggested otherwise. We are walking contradictions. I gave my dog up because for every scenario in which we found a way to make it work, I could also imagine a scenario in which it didn’t work. Despite trying to practice “and” thinking: “I loved my dog and I chose to give him up…” I still find myself trying to reconcile something closer to an “or” statement, “I loved my dog, but obviously not enough to keep him.”
That second statement is hard to admit and own. As such, my mind looks for justifications. In my head and when I talk about him to people, I overplay some of his more aggressive tendencies – the two fights he had been in and the way he greeted strangers who came up to the house. But the truth is, I don’t think that’s his core nature. I suspect part of what I’m doing by highlighting his more challenging characteristics is trying to justify why I couldn’t take him with me… trying to lessen my culpability and ease my guilt. The truth is, he was getting better with a number of those things (though still not great when he saw other dogs). Most people who met us on our morning or afternoon walk would comment on how well behaved and how well trained he was. He was friendly towards, though often disinterested in, other people. The truth is, I suspect with additional training, socialization, and continued patience, he might have been fine in a city, he might have grown accepting of other dogs. I’m just not sure I had the means, expertise, and patience to get him there. And this is the final parallel. I was once told something along those same lines: “I don’t have the patience to get you and us to where I want this relationship to be.”
This is also where I suspect the parallels end. I don’t resent my dog. I don’t blame him for the way he is (though I do blame whoever had him before me). If I saw him tomorrow, I’d be thrilled to see him and I suspect he’d be happy to see me. I could easily be convinced to bring him back into my life. I don’t think love and care is that fleeting, or that decisions can’t be reversed, or that we can’t find ways to make amends. But then again, unlike humans, dogs don’t really have egos – they tend to accept us for who we are and how we are. They don’t worry about the future or what changes lie ahead.
It’s only been a few days, but I miss the dog. When I open the fridge, I’m still expecting him to come see what I’m doing. I had gotten used to having him by my side (and sometimes underfoot). I suspect I’ll always miss him. I suspect that I’ll always have this guilty feeling that I could have done more, that with additional help and resources I could have made it work with him – that we would have figured it out… I think that’s an under-examined and underappreciated aspect of love – this feeling that with enough time, space, and compassion, we could figure this thing out.