Cut through the clutter

The following is the most recent column I wrote for the summer edition of Valley Parents magazine. Yes, this is a cop-out and I recognize that, but well, what are you gonna do.

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At eight months in, I can say I’ve learned a few things about parenting.

A sample:

1) I can do almost everything I did pre-baby, but now with one hand – including write this column.
2) It is possible to craft scintillating dinner conversation around the contents of a soiled diaper.
3) Less is more (and not necessarily in relation to No. 2).

Now, No. 3 is an unlikely revelation for yours truly, as I’m sort of a “more is more” kind of gal. As proof, please refer to my laughably large and impractical purse collection, and the 60-plus wine glasses that wound up on our wedding registry after a power mad UPC scanner spree through Crate and Barrel. White wine, red wine, stemless, stemmed, causal, formal. I needed 60. And yes, all but about four of them are in still packed in boxes stacked in our laundry room.

But I checked my usual leanings toward the mass accumulation of stuff at the door when it came to my daughter, June. What my wedding registry lacked in austerity, my baby want/need list made up for in an uncharacteristic lack of clutter. My parents and in-laws hooked us up with most of the necessities, the rest I approached with a “we’ll cross that wipe warmer when we come to it” sensibility.

If it isn’t borrowed, it was purchased on the cheap. If June can make do without, she does without. We’ve purchased a few teething toys to supplement all the generous gifts she’s received, but that’s about it. Any items she does have to play with are augmented by her fascination (mostly oral) with books. She’s got plenty of books.

Invariably while playing with her toys, June loses interest in the modest assortment of noisemakers and stuffed animals before her and snatches a pair of baby pants out of a pile of folded laundry. The journal I keep in her room for my tearful scrawlings of baby milestones may as well contain Elmo’s tell-all with the way she lunges for it. The lid for the plastic container holding some of her teething toys is like forbidden fruit. Who needs Fisher-Price when you’ve got Tupperware?

That resourcefulness has got to be from her dad’s side. My husband has spent a good chunk of his life fending for himself in the wilderness, everything needed for survival efficiently wrapped up in the pack on his back. This has always fascinated me.

Me: “Wait, what about the spare deodorant?”
Him: “You don’t bring deodorant.”
Me: “So, no scented shower gels?”
Him: “You’re kidding, right?”
Me “How about a tube of mascara – can you bring mascara?”
Him: (silence)

Stuff is not his bag. Ironically, he wound up with someone who cites bags as her bag.

But I am getting better, and I credit several house moves in as many years with tempering my need to collect and save. And June, too. Watching her while away 25 minutes chewing on her cereal bowl has hammered the lesson home.

While visiting my parents in suburban Chicago recently, I spent some time going through old boxes of things I’ve held on to from grammar school, high school and college. I was appalled at what I found: mortifyingly sappy journal entries (grammar school), a program from some football game of which I have zero recollection (high school), an old beer bottle, the skunked, syrupy remains of Rolling Rock still redolent in its green confines.(College, clearly). I saved the journal, the rest was tossed.

I was thinking of June as I was decluttering. Would she be interested in seeing any of this someday? Should she be seeing any of this someday? Would I want her to cling mightily to so much stuff?

I’m not a maker of New Year’s resolutions but I did pledge one in the low light of a frigid winter’s morn with June in my arms: Don’t say “need” when you mean “want.” I need food, shelter, love. I want a haircut, a meatball sub, those wine glasses.

It’s a bit why I’ve really tried to pare things down when it comes to June’s belongings – in order to save what matters. I’d like to be able to produce an old toy that she spent hours gnawing on and tell her, when she’s an adult and we’re enjoying a glass of wine out of her mother’s ridiculous collection, what it meant to her. Or show her the blueberry stains on the summer dress that showed off her deliciously chubby knees. Or flip through her favorite board book, the page corners tattered from being gummed more than seen.

But that’s the stuff I want to keep.

No, it’s the stuff I need to keep.

A Dilla of a pickle

Sunday morning was a gray day, outside and in.

All because of a black-and-white hound.

We said goodbye to our 2-and-a-half-year-old dog, Dilla. It was a pretty fraught decision, but it's the right one for all parties involved. Especially her. She went to live with a wonderful family in Connecticut. And no, that's not code for anything nefarious, she really is living with a wonderful family in Connecticut.

Greg and I have been hemming and hawing about finding a new home for her for a little bit now. We're gearing up to move again, someplace a lot smaller, and having two dogs cooped up in a tiny house or apartment is not fair to them. June is about to start crawling and in order to create more space for her, we're boxing the dogs out even more. We've had Dilla for two years, versus Gypsy's nine with Greg, so by default she was the one on the chopping block, so to speak. It's a lot of work, and expense, to have them both and a baby and I can't devote the attention to them I used to with June around. It's more than we can handle on multiple levels. To quote Greg quoting the USPS after announcing the closing of all those post office branches, we're trying to "rightsize" our operation. Dilla is collateral damage in that rightsizing.

But only for us -- she's somewhere that is going to make her blissfully happy.

It was sort of the perfect scenario. My friend Gerry was looking for a dog, a black one, too, and we were looking to find Dilla a new home. It happened quickly, but that's better than being belabored I suppose. Gerry has two sons young enough to bestow upon Dilla a cuddle-crazy heroine's welcome, but not too young that she's going to he headed toward a tail pull-a-thon. The way Gerry describes his sons, they will be great for her, and her, them. I can't think of a better solution to this.

Either way, it's breaking my heart. Concurrently breaking and warming. Warming the broken pieces. The dogs drove me up a freaking wall this winter, about which I've written, but as June has gotten older and more aware of their high entertainment value, and as the mass of snow gave way to a backyard paradise, the pooches made their way back into my heart. But while there may be room in our hearts, our home is another story. And big dogs in small spaces ain't fair. And truly wonderful dogs, like Dilla, deserve the best.

I had a pit in my stomach leading up to when Gerry was slated to arrive. I gave Dilla a bath -- always a challenge -- then shared a little of my homemade macaroni and cheese with her. I tried to take a couple of photos but she turned her head to the side and gave me this eye, like "When was the last time you took a photo of me alone? Something must be up."

I burst into tears while feeding June that morning, the blubbering and bleating sending her into fits of hysterical laughter. I called Dilla over to sit with us, her tail thumping the ground and her head weaving to and fro under my hand in order to find the petting sweet spot. I stared at the two of them, June and Dilla, and let go of the image I always carried in my head -- the one looking about five years into the future, of my dog sleeping at the foot of my daughter's bed. Staying close, as she did with me while I was pregnant.

Greg and I got her a little over two years ago from the Southwest Missouri Humane Society. It was already beastly hot for early June, and Greg woke up early to call a guy about a canoe he saw on craigslist. The canoe had sold so Greg, summoning up the next-best-thing suggestion, said, "Wanna go look at a dog?"

I didn't. We already had a dog, a wonderful dog, and two seemed like a handful. But being a good new wife (and also morbidly curious), and understanding the merits of Greg's argument (puppies are much easier to train with older dogs around), I obliged. He had been sending me links to a puppy he found on petfinder.com. The jpeg showed a goofy looking little thing, ink-black, save for a white spot on her chest and paws, with a huge head and two spazzy hind feet kicked out next to her. The listing said she was half-black lab, half-Great Pyrenees. It said her name was "Alyssa."

"Alyssa?? They have got to be freaking kidding," I thought.

I get that a humane society might be hard-pressed to generate original names for each of the hundreds of puppy mill drop-offs that get carted through their doors yearly, but I'm a little wary of pet names that are reasonable monikers for humans. Roger. Stephen. JoAnn.

Alyssa.

We got to the humane society and Greg told the volunteer that we were there to look at Alyssa (oy). She led us into the corridor of dog cages, a Phil Spector-grade Wall of (barking) Sound chattering our teeth.

"There she is, the one on the left."

Dilla (er, Alyssa) sat and watched us, ears perked up on her disproportionately large head, tail thumping the ground, her front white paws dancing in excitement. Her littermate was with her -- humping, biting and pawing the dogshit out of Dilla (sorry, Alyssa). She paid it no mind, and continued to stare at us with a sort of pitiful hope.

Shitshitshitshit, I thought. She's freaking adorable.

Next we took her outside to their dedicated dog run, watched her break into the goofiest gait imaginable, possibly for the first time. We threw a ball and she watched it sail through the air. When it landed with a thud she went back to sniffing a pile of dog turds near our flip-flopped feet. A fetch dog she is not. Finally Greg put the onus on me: "Well, what do you think?"

Shitshitshitshit.

Let's do it. Greg said she should be my dog. I should name her.

I liked that.

As soon as the decision was made, I was in love. She wasn't jumpy or yippy or snippy in any way. She just stared at us, tail wagging, happy to be there. We got home and Gypsy was salty, growling at her as we brought her inside, clearly cognizant that there had been a seismic doggy shift in the house. He disappeared as we fawned over the new pup, who was puttering around and taking dumps at will. That night as we were getting ready for bed upstairs (stairs that we had to carry her up), she made her way to Gypsy's dog bed in the corner of our room. She sniffed around and plopped down with confidence as if to say, "I'll be taking this one, thanks." Gypsy, who had spent the afternoon pouting in our basement, eventually came upstairs to find that his last sacred space, the foul WalMart dog bed, was now occupied. Gypsy tends to internalize his feelings (this is a veterinarian's assessment, by the way), and sighed and opted for an impossible-to-access nook in between the bed and the dresser. There he stayed until we moved months later.

Dilla, who is named after the late experimental hiphop producer J. Dilla, took to the basic obedience commands early and easily, and even had a relatively smooth transition into house training. She did, however, enjoy gnawing on wood, linoleum, carpeting and anything else not cheaply replaced, earning her the nickname "Security Deposit Killer." For a long time she refused to go to the bathroom on walks, and when she heard another dog barking she'd hit the deck and decline movement altogether. She wouldn't lick our faces, but instead aggressively sniff one of our eyeballs, and she would sit and watch me get dressed in the morning with an almost perverted zeal. She'd eschew her dish of clean cold water, choosing instead the brackish, larvae-loaded rain water collecting in lawn chairs in our yard. You couldn't sit anywhere near her on nice days outside, as she'd be mobbed by winged insects. Her dense coat was what we referred to as "Fly Xanadu." She had a bark, which she used often, that sounded like Phil Hartman imitating Ed McMahon.

She shed more than any animal has a right to, and would occasionally go AWOL when we let her out for her morning whiz. She'd get up multiple times in the middle of the night to adjust her position, walking in a circle and then falling to the floor with a sleep-shattering thud. This went on until we blocked the stairway to keep the dogs out of our rooms at night. She had a nervous peeing problem for a while, leaving little yellow surprises on our tile floors. Or worse, when we lived in that horrible place in Lebanon, would retreat upstairs to pinch one on the carpet right outside the bathroom. That dog pissed me off to no end on multiple occasions.

But man oh man, was she sweet. And smart. And, AWOL incidents notwithstanding, extremely obedient. She was a saint with June, and sat patiently while I slowly lost my mind and yelled during the long, harsh winter spent trapped indoors. Before we banished dogs from furniture, she would get on the couch next to me and put her head in my lap, snoring like a large man. She was my girl -- well, my girl before my girl was my girl -- and she loved it.

Monday night was a rough night. The house was bigger, quieter, emptier. Greg noted that was sort of the point in us finding a new home for her, we were running out of room, but still, it hurt. She's still everywhere -- and by that I mean her thick, coarse hair is covering every surface in our home. But also that I instinctively went to retrieve her absent food dish to get her dinner, waited at the door for a minute too long after Gypsy came back in the house, thinking she was still outside, and even now, I have my feet drawn under my desk chair to make room for a snoring black dog that's not there.

And Gerry, if you're reading this, it's in no way meant to lay a big guilt trip on you. You're ushering in Dilla 2.0 and doing us the mightiest of good deeds. More importantly, doing her the mightiest of good deeds.

Right at the point last night when I was feeling saddest, guiltiest, most regretful, my phone let out a ping and on it was a text message from Gerry. He wrote of how great she was on the drive to his home, and how they had taken a nice walk, and that the family was in love with her already. Included was a photo of his two adorable, redheaded sons doting on Dilla, parked on the floor with what can only be described as a big ol' doggy smile on her face. I burst into tears. That's exactly what she deserves.

It was meant to be.

I know some day June will ask why we gave away such a great dog, and I will have a less-than-great answer for her. "You'll understand when you're an adult," I'll tell her. Hell, she might not. I won't blame her. But I think of those boys, those sweet redheaded boys, and I'll tell June, "We had to share her. She was too good to keep for ourselves."

I was remembering back before I got pregnant and how Greg and I would go running together. He would take Gypsy, always game for exercise, and I would take Dilla, more of a couch dog who had to be coaxed into a run. Sounds familiar. Dilla and I felt the same way about morning runs as we did a lot of things. It's goofy to say that a dog reminds you of yourself, but Dilla was a lot like me. A perennial younger sibling, a bit of an instigator, a homebody, sort of a loner, a smartass, a pleaser, a cuddler.

A vocal sort, and a little too loud when she needn't be.

I'm not going to pretend that saying goodbye to Dilla was akin to losing a loved (human) one. But it was still hard, and likely the hardest decision we've ever had to make. My mom said something about how now we have a taste of what it will be like when June goes to college. Now, I know that this is not exactly a fair simile, but I sort of get what she's saying. The baby grows up and needs space we can't give her, needs space that's going to help her grow. We oblige.

Last night before we went to bed Greg said to me, "My heart is heavy. Let's have that be the only dog we ever give away." I started sobbing, the guilt and grief bubbling out into my husband's arms. But then I thought of that picture Gerry sent and my tears stopped, pretty abruptly. I fell fast asleep.

I don't remember my dreams.

One of my father-in-law's old Tennessee idioms is, "The sun shines on every dog's ass some day." And Sunday, after the fog burned off, and as Gerry's car was rolling out of our gravel driveway, I caught a glimpse of Dilla through his rear window.

Tail wagging.