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Friday, Nov 6, 2009
Day by day, we log more encounters of the doggie kind: We pass a couple sitting on a bench, a dog sitting on his haunches between them. Isaiah's dog-alert goes off -- the arms whirring up and down, the siren of delight -- and the woman in this couple falls in love with my son.
"Here, want to feed Coco?" she asks. She gives Isaiah a dog biscuit. He holds it out to the dog, who licks it up. He laughs as the dog keeps licking, licking his empty hand and his wrist all the way to the elbow and beyond. Isaiah shrieks with pleasure and holds his hand out like a prize. Even after the couple leaves and the dog's tail wags away, he holds his dog-licked arm up like a trophy.
Why didn't I like dogs for so many years? Fear. And why, for so many years, didn't I want to have a baby? Fear. When I was a child, growing up in Los Angeles, a huge red dog lived behind my house. On my side of a very short chain link fence grew some agapanthus and jade plants; on the other side was a fierce, salivating, jaw-snapping attack machine. I feared being eaten by that dog.
As an adult, I outgrew my fear of being eaten by a dog, but not the fear of being consumed. People with dogs, and babies, love them beyond measure. They are consumed with love. I never believed that I could survive such inordinate passion.
When I was a child, I never asked to have a dog. I thought that dogs were dirty, noisy, mean. I also believed that there was not enough time, energy or space (love) in our house for children and a dog. What no one told me, until my husband mentioned it, is that love breeds more love. Love of a dog just makes room for more love. My husband can, it now appears, love me and our baby. More marvelous: I, too, love them both.
There is, of course, a developmental explanation for the phenomenon of dog love in both Isaiah's life and mine. The rationalist will point to Isaiah's growing capacity to retrieve memories over the course of his first year of life. Isaiah is not simply experiencing dog for the first time, over and over, but linking memories and fitting them into the concept of dog. Thanks to object permanence, Isaiah has, from six months, known that dogs do not cease to exist when he cannot see them.
I, too, have entered a new developmental phase, in which the ability to love a dog is connected to the experience of generativity that pulled me into parenthood. Yet science cannot explain everything. I managed to avoid my biological destiny for two decades, and might have avoided it permanently.
Instead, I have taken a leap of faith. I am listening to the part of me that says: Let's try it, let's see what happens. I feared I would not be even remotely decent as a mother. Now I am doing the thing I cannot do perfectly and loving myself a bit, loving Isaiah all the more. Why is it that I didn't see dogs before? I think I didn't know -- didn't want to know -- that I am like a dog, out in the world looking for scraps of food, warmth and love, maybe some shade on a hot day.
I don't see sexy men on the street anymore. Like the invisible dogs of my past, the sexy men have been removed to some other dimension far from mine. Now I live in dog's world, and I can sense that there is a dog out there now, already smiling, a bit of drool coming off his long tongue, waiting for me to notice and smile back.
