Treating your dog or cat like a baby is not something to brag about. At best, an admission of parental love will get you pitying looks and a quiet corner to yourself at parties; at worst you’ll be held up as an example of What Is Wrong With Society Today.
What could be a more perfect example of bourgeois folly, the unspoken assumption goes, than substituting a slobbery, stinky dog for a human infant?
Well, I beg to differ. My dog was my baby; and now that I have an actual baby, I see that my dog prepared me for motherhood far better than any of those What to Expect books.
When we adopted Lily the beagle from a rescue group, my husband and I were living the blissful life of DINKs – Double Income, No Kids. It was a sweet set-up: We travelled, went to fancy restaurants, slept late on weekends and kept fragile vases on low shelves.
Then along came Lily. Soon, everything we owned was coated in a fine layer of dog hair. Our schedules shifted to revolve around walks, off-leash parks and vet visits. When we moved to Toronto, we chose our house in the Beaches neighbourhood partly because we knew Lily would love Lake Ontario.
Sometimes we longed for the days when we could do dinner, a movie and drinks without worrying about what sort of “surprise” Lily was depositing on our living room floor.
But mostly, we marvelled at the joy this sweet, stubborn, goofy dog brought into our lives. When my husband taught her to shake paws, he kvelled like a proud papa. Our hard drive filled up with photos of Lily at the beach, Lily in the woods, Lily sleeping, Lily and her Christmas stocking filled with biscuits.
When our parents hinted about grandchildren, I would say, “But you have Lily!”
Then Lily got sick. That’s the problem with dogs: They don’t live nearly long enough for us to love them as much as they deserve.
An odd bout of panting led to chest X-rays, which led to a diagnosis of lung cancer – a tumour the size of a pop can in a 30-pound dog. With treatment, the vet told us, she might have a few more months. We walked down to the beach and let her off leash; she raced gleefully to the water’s edge, stopping briefly to lick something disgusting that had washed ashore. Paws in the water, she turned to us and wagged her tail as if to say, “Ain’t life grand?”
You meet the nicest people in animal hospital waiting rooms. As Lily outlasted the initial prognosis of three months, then went six months, then past a year – with no signs of illness apart from some slowing down we could rationalize away as age-related – her story of survival became an inspiration to other owners with red-rimmed eyes who’d just learned of their pet’s cancer.
We swapped information about doctors and treatments, but most of all we enjoyed the company of other people who got it. My waiting-room friends never asked me if it made sense to spend all this time and money on a dog. Of course it made sense. She was our baby.
And then along came a real baby.
Nine months after Lily’s diagnosis, I became pregnant with our first child. I read up on how to introduce your dog to your baby, all the while praying that Lily would make it that far.
Some days she seemed full of spunk, just like her old self, and other days she would walk into walls and pee in the hallway with a tired, helpless look in her eyes. Preoccupied as I was with the life growing inside me, I couldn’t bear to think about ending the life that was dwindling in front of me.
