A Dog Biographer

Eileen Myles calls themself a “Dog Biographer.” The thing is, they actually did write a biography, a memoir, for their dog. I can relate to this, though, the idea of being a dog biographer. People, when they have children, they take endless scrolls of pictures, and we, those of us who don’t have children, have to scroll farther to get away from them. Who scrolls past a cute dog picture? Or a cute dog video? No one I know. Daily, I take photographs of my dogs napping, as if they will never nap in that same way again. I suppose with human children, the child will grow up and actually may never do the thing exactly the same way again.

 

There are certain expectations for us now that we are married. The expectation is to have children. We have good jobs already, we own a house. Of course, the next step is children, logically. Yet now, I am stuck with this feeling that we have to work harder to prove that our lives are meaningful. Our lives are our own. Or, we share them with four-legged creatures. We are not alone. We are happy and fulfilled. And we have each other. The experience I am speaking about is being a gay woman, a woman married to another woman.

 

Bennet always looks like she’s pursing her lips. She always wants you to scratch her chest, and she will paw at your hand until you scratch where she wants. She has to sit right next to you, will push her body close against yours or try to fit herself on one small sliver of the couch just to be touching you.

 

Virginia Woolf was actually a dog biographer. She wrote the novel Flush from the point of view of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. It is fictional and also non-fictional. How can one really know what a dog is thinking?

 

I usually can’t even deal with dog stories. Instagram and Facebook videos make me tear up. Even though the dogs usually turn out O.K. in the end, I still just can’t imagine that much sadness and hurt in their lives. And in the end, also, they usually still love people. What kind of people get to spend their lives loving dogs who are broken? I would do it myself if I didn’t think I would be a rotten mess, if I didn’t think I would cry every day. Maybe I would cry from the love that the dogs gave me, a mere human. I’ve never written about my own dogs. I imagine that will probably make me tear up, too.

 

Tony is all ears. But, in a plot twist, he can’t hear anymore. I’d thought maybe this would be better because he wouldn’t hear all the things that make him anxious (the garbage man, the ice cream truck, the mail carrier, the black cat, who is completely silent, the neighbors fixing cars, the neighbors blaring loud music from their car stereos on Saturdays, the greying pug, who grazes slowly on the edge of our lawn, and its owner). This is not the case. He’s more anxious than ever. My mother said, “Up his dosage of Prozac.” The sad thing is, he really is on Prozac.

 

On my summer vacations, Bennet spends her afternoons curled up on my chest with her head beneath my chin. We have an afternoon nap every day. When I married my wife, I vowed that I would snuggle her as much as I snuggle dogs, but sometimes I know I’m not holding up my end of the bargain.

 

The dogs are contradictions of themselves. When we lived in an apartment, neither of them liked to walk or pee in the rain. Now that we have a house with a yard, neither likes to pee in the rain, but Bennet will sit on the deck in the rain, watching it rain, until I call her in to be towel dried.

 

Tony hates men, except he took a particular liking to the man who photographed our wedding. I think it must have something to do with the way he scratches behind Tony’s ears.

 (Me and Bennet at Boston Pride, 2017)

When we got Bennet, she contracted giardia in the first few weeks we had her. While we were at work, we kept her gated in the bathroom, where the floors were tiled and easy to clean. There was a string of days where I came home to dog shit isolated to the spot right in front of the baby gate, where Bennet also liked to jump up and down to express her excitement at my arrival. Even before I took off my winter coat, I’d pick her up, take her to the tub and scrub the shit out from between the pads of her feet. I made sure the water was warm enough, then held her shivering body wrapped in a towel afterwards. She licked the bottom of my chin. She was sick for only a short time, but it took longer to potty-train her, so this act took place every few days. Sometimes the whole gate went into the bathtub. On those days, I prayed for a house with a backyard and a hose, and I had to go to the gym before Jen got home or else I’d get mad at her and question our decision making.

 

Do new parents think about children like this? Like, I’ve made the wrong decision? Who do I return him to? Of course, now that Bennet is old enough not to dance in her own shit, she still has accidents, and yet I can’t even bring myself to imagine my life without her. As resistant as I am to having my own children, I guess that’s probably the closest I can come to understanding the feeling of having a human infant.

 

What makes my life meaningful? The 85 children I teach daily who are not my own? The LGBTQ youth whom I work with twice per month that are not my own? Every year, at the beginning of the school year, we have district training for active shooter situations. The man who does the training always asks us to think about the thing that is meaningful to us, the thing that we believe is worth living for. Everyone has something, he says. I always imagine that everyone else says their kids. I always think: I have Jen, and I have my dogs.

 

What is the purpose of being married if not to have children? Isn’t that what we’ve been taught? What are the options for couples: to have or not to have? And for LGBTQ couples? Is it worth the $40,000? How badly do we want them? Being married means having a partner in life, someone to do things with: everyday things and also the occasions where you travel across the world to places that you’ve never been and explore dreams that you’ve always had but never dreamed would come true. Being married means you have someone to laugh with and someone to cry with. Can we still have fulfilled lives without human children?

 

In a presentation on positive psychology and the science of happiness, a woman named Pam Garramone shared some of her life experiences with our small group. When asked to think of what made her most happy, she told us she always imagined her dog, Ginger. She then told us that she was told that she should love herself as much as she loves Ginger. First, there’s the issue of self love, which is complicated, then there’s the issue of dogs, of creatures who are so wonderfully loving. That’s a no-brainer. Of course we love the dogs. But what if we loved ourselves as much as our dogs loved us? Or as much as we loved our dogs? That would be some powerful self love.

 

I’d like to think I come by all this honestly. When I was five, I wanted a dog more than anything. Snowflake was with me from the time I was 5 or 6 until I was 22. She had quite a run despite the fact that she was an escape artist and regularly pranced out of our yard and down the middle of the street. When I imagine my ideal life, there is always me and a dog. So, the issue comes back to the dogs. Back to those four-legged friends who will always be happy to see you if you treat them well, will always love you no matter what. They can’t pay for a nursing home when you’re old, but, by God, they’ll make you happy.