Published: September 28, 2008 01:42 am            

GUERILLA MOTHERING: Going to the dogs — parenting gets hairy and furry

So, a friend of mine has a little Shih Tzu. We’re pretty close, so she and her dog (the Bean) come over quite a bit. The way she hovers over her dog is roughly equivalent to how I treated my oldest child, when he was a baby. Where was he? What was he doing? Was he getting into trouble? Impossible. Mama was always watching.

My friend knows the color of her dog’s gums on any given day. I let my oldest go for three weeks with a loose tooth before it fell out into a bite of popcorn (studded with chocolates and Twizzlers). Need I detail the recent medical history of the Bean, or her vet-prescribed diet? My low maintenance Jack Russell Terrier looks at the Bean as if she’s a different species altogether. “Is this how the other half lives?” I can practically hear her little doggie mind.

Now, don’t get me wrong. My friend does not dress her dog in clothes or push her in a stroller. She’s not that crazy—yet. But she does love that little dog with a kind of devotion seldom seen in parents to human children. And that interests me.

Naturally, it’s easy to point out the reasons why smothering a dog with affection could be easier than spoiling a child in the same way. Dogs can be trained to come when called. When it’s time for bed, they snuggle up at your feet without demanding one last drink, one more story, or a scuffle over whether or not to brush one’s teeth. Dogs don’t demand an all-day SpongeBob marathon on a rainy day. They can be satisfied for months chewing on a $1 knot of rope. If you take them for a walk, they don’t start whining half-way, begging to go home to retrieve the scooter their brothers are inevitably going to fight over. You don’t have to change a dog’s diapers, in most cases. Dogs are comparatively easy, giving so much to their owners, and asking so little.

I’ve met many couples who had dear pets before they became parents. Interestingly, I don’t see much correlation between their parenting from the canine/feline days to the months after bringing home their little bundle of human joy. In our case, our spoiled cats became second-class citizens, and though I felt guilt about it after a decade solo with the creatures, I knew my priorities lay with my husband and son, before my cats. Since then, we’ve obviously given a good home to a terrific rescue dog, and I’m glad we did, but even though our dog is a member of the family, she’s not the whole family. She’s a loved and happy dog, and she’s primarily my dog (because I’m greedy and I don’t want to share her), but she’s not my kid.

And then there are the parents who treat their children peculiarly — at least, to me. Perhaps because I have such rough-and-tumble boys, these families who house little boys with perpetually clean fingernails, dressed in little matching suits, or who wear bizarre things like clean sneakers to school just mystify me. I have met enough little girls (and remember being one, myself), to know that girls love climbing trees, dancing in the tall grass, and twirling around wearing their favorite princess dresses — maybe even with a tiny Strawberry Shortcake purse stuffed full of tissues and small dolls — maybe even in the mud and the rain.

Kids love to play, and when they play, they get dirty. Kids love getting dirty, and they love bubble baths. It’s like kids and dirt were just meant to be, you know? Children who aren’t allowed to experience such things seem gypped out of part of their childhood. They’re more like kept things. More like pets, than people.

Kids also break things. Get lost once in a great while. Pack their rucksacks and threaten to run away. Throw temper tantrums in public, splash all the water out of the tub, find your secret stash of chocolate and eat it all, and scare the hell out of you by climbing up a ladder you thought you’d put away. Kids learn by experiencing and exploring, and any child worth his salt can find the weakness in even the safest home. Seriously, those velociraptors in Jurassic Park? They had nothing on your typical human child.

As for me, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Once in a great while (think: family photo days), my boys are forced through a grooming process to rival any beauty contestant’s. They sneer as I run a comb through their hair. They glower while their dress shoes are being tied. They examine their little clip-on ties and delight in the novelty. They love how they look, and they love hearing they look so handsome — but give them five minutes in their freshly ironed finery, and it’s all over. They’re boys. They’re not trained to sit, and they don’t beg. They aren’t paraded out for a show, and they don’t have to do tricks to earn my love.

The best of parents, whether of human kids or of the four-legged furry variety, love their charges and love who they are. I dare say that an avid dog mom knows more about caring for a high-maintenance purebred than many parents know about accepting and loving a child by nature.

Curling up at night, whether next to a wagging tail, or with a stack of picture books to read to the kids by flashlight, what really matters is not how good of a job we did as parents that day — but that our loved ones know they are loved. Dogs can be easier to convince than children, that’s for sure, but parenting human children, I believe, is not meant to be easy.

I can’t speak for what dogs experience, but children learn by doing, and they see how much they are loved by our actions. Not just perfunctory hugs or hurried kisses, but the way we show we care in all we do — whether watching over them at the side of the hospital bed, or pushing them in the swing in the backyard. You can say “I love you” all day long, but if you don’t live it, you might as well be talking to a dog. Kids know.

Not long ago, Bean’s mom leapt the fence in our backyard and fell pretty hard on her side, rescuing that shaggy little blur from the nearby street. After the second escape, my husband put down landscape timbers to “babyproof” the back fence, so Bean couldn’t do it again. He’d had to jump the fence at midnight three nights in a row to retrieve our cat for me, so he understood.

“It’s no trouble,” he said. “I’m just a Dad. This is what parents do.”

I think our kids know.



Leslea M. Harmon is a full-time mom of three boys, one dog, and one cat, and the wife of photographer Stephen A. Harmon. They all live together in a very, very, very fine house in New Albany, IN. Reach Leslea at Leslea.Harmon@gmail.com, or visit her website at lmharmon.com.

        

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