Raising a dog teaches considerable understanding, especially for someone who does not have any children.
Thinking back to those first weeks Keisha lived with us, I admit I lacked considerable understanding.
Groans escaped my mouth every time she woke me up to go outside in the middle of the night, whether for a bathroom break or due to an illness.
Keisha tended to eat her toys as she destroyed them - she once ate an entire sock, if you can imagine - and, well, she had a little trouble expelling them from her body.
She only had two options, really, neither of which were pretty. And, they both required numerous trips outdoors.
In the early days, she'd vomit right on her bed. This required a lot of effort to clean up in the middle of the night. First, I had to get her outside in case there was more on its way. Then I'd have to take her bed downstairs to throw it into the wash. Of course, this meant I had to locate another bed for her to sleep on.
This became problematic during her tomato-stealing days when she'd sneak into our basement and scarf down as many tomatoes as she could before we could catch her.
I placed the tomatoes in boxes and on tables all over the basement, in order for them to ripen for canning. But, she developed a taste for them (though tomatoes can potentially cause serious issues for a dog's health), and whenever we turned our backs, zoom she went. Down the stairs.
In those days, it was common for her to vomit a couple times in a night. You'd think she'd get a clue after awhile that the tomatoes just didn't sit right in her stomach. Apparently not.
A couple times we ran out of bedding options and she had to sleep on the bare floor. From her obvious distaste for the situation, the floor was not her favourite place to sleep. It was as if we had forced her to sleep outside on the ground. (What on earth would she have done if she were a farm dog?)
She's much better today. We keep on top of throwing out her toys as she rips them apart, before she has a chance to ingest all those stringy fabric pieces. However, we don't always catch them in time.
As I sit here on my living room couch writing this column, Keisha is curled up beside me because she just finished vomiting for the third time. She's not even supposed to be on the couch as my tattoo is still healing, but it's impossible to say no when is sick.
See, a lot has changed.
In those early days, I was still way more concerned as to whether she would vomit on the carpet again and possibly ruin it this time. (Wow, it's almost embarrassing to admit that.)
Now, I fuss over her and worry whether or not she's really sick, or just ate something that didn't agree with her finicky stomach. (Judging from the piles of vomit she left on the carpet and in the porch, she began eating one of her ropes.)
Comparing my reactions from then and now, I realize I have developed an understanding that never really existed for me before. It's not that I ever thought Keisha vomited on purpose, or that she woke me up five or six times in a night just for fun, but I always felt inconvenienced before. (Again, that is almost embarrassing to admit.)
And now, now I just feel helpless. All I want to do is help my poor Keisha feel better, but I can't.
This must be how a new mother feels when her baby is sick.
This is also why I strongly believe raising a dog can help a person a great deal when it comes to raising a child. If a person can develop this understanding with a dog, then it will just come naturally with a child. (For all I know, it does already. But I do know people who complain when their child is sick, so maybe not.)
In addition, raising a dog teaches responsibility and it trains a person to know what it feels like to have another being dependent upon him or her. I think this is one of those essential life lessons.
If nothing else, it feels nice to have someone who depends on me. And, what else can beat coming home at the end of a rough day to a big black lab named Keisha, who wags her tail so fast and hard when she sees me, her whole body wags.
Nothing, that's what.
