How Joy Shows Up at a Potty Break
Thoughts on Free Range Dog Parenting
My lovely husband is not easily exasperated.
In fact I’ve faithfully taken up that role in our household, a calling handed down to me from my father, and I take it seriously. I get irritated by a poorly arranged dishwasher and not lifting the toilet seat and not picking up one’s wet towels after showering. That’s only the beginning of the list. A long, long list. And my exasperation goes as far as making proclamations that I will never follow through with, such as:
“If you can’t learn to put up the toilet seat, then you’ll be in charge of cleaning every toilet in this house from now till eternity.”
Or…
“If you can’t pick up your wet towels, then I will hide all the other towels in the house and you’ll be forced to use your wet one every time you shower.”
I don’t just mumble these punishments in my head. I say them out loud. I declare them like Moses calling down judgement on the Egyptians. And then I faithfully forget or get too busy or simply don’t have the energy to carry out my decrees. As my son so aptly put it the other day, “She’s all bark and no bite.”
From the mouths of babes…
My husband, on the other hand, holds his exasperation for only a few offenses, and while they are usually committed by our children, there is one in particular that is consistently perpetrated by yours truly. It happens when on a particularly cold or rainy day, I let our dog, Winnie, out for her bathroom break but fail to truly commit to the task of overseeing the process. I stand, front door ajar, with my head peeking out while gusts of cold, damp air rush past me and into the house. Then, after 15 seconds or so, I abandon my post completely, muttering something like, “I’ll check on her in a minute.”
The problem with this approach (and my husband knows it) is that Winnie, while a typically obedient dog, is also led by her whimsy. We live on the edge of a forest and there is no limit to the enticing smells and sounds that will lure her into its depths. Even from our front yard, the sirens call her around back, beyond the tree line, down through the bamboo patch, and below to the small inlet along the river where she indulges in her greatest pleasure—swimming. More than once, when I’ve left my post (“for only a few moments!” I insist), Winnie has reappeared after much whistling and calling of her name with a drenched coat and what could only be described as a smile upon her brown lips.
Those are the good times.
The bad times are when she arrives back home with something thick and quickly drying on her coat, something that smells like a stagnate sewer, and then she has to be rushed into the bathtub and scrubbed down with no less than half a bottle of dog shampoo. Or when she doesn’t respond to our calls and whistles and is found sniffing in someone’s trash four streets away only after an all-hands-on-deck scouring of the neighborhood.
My husband doesn’t have the patience for the drama of it all: the negligent watchwoman, the naive soul trotting away, the delight or disaster waiting around the corner—it’s a Shakespearean comedy or tragedy in the making. So when I assume my role in the first act, Shawn now steps in in a fluster (contrary to me, he’s no bark and all bite). “Oh, I’ll just let her out,” he mutters, hustling his coat on and bustling out the door. “Now, hurry up!” he calls to Winnie, and she obeys; the curtain is closed before the play even begins.
What my husband doesn’t know is that, while, yes, I do usually abandon my duties because the weather has bested me, there is also a small sliver of my spirit that wants to turn my back and just let Winnie be free. I know, I know. When you commit to dog ownership, the first rule is: I will be responsible for my pet.
But what about Winnie being free? Roaming the countryside like her ancestors. Following a scent to its musky origin and finding what (or who) that actually is. Digging down deep into the muck and guts of the forest to uncover…anything. Wasn’t this what she was born for? Not the 10 minute potty breaks we allot to her 3 times a day (she has a very roomy bladder), the 20 minute run-around she gets when the kids come home from school, and the thrice-weekly jaunts her and I take in the park. Doesn’t Winnie deserve more?
And then I remember my conversation with our next door neighbor. He’s an outspoken advocate of free-range dog parenting. Looking down at his graying, geriatric mutt, he told me, “I just can’t chain her up. She’s a dog. She’s meant to be free.” And I can tell he means it. This isn’t just a shirking of duties. He wants his dog to live to the fullest. Problem is that his dog’s fullest also includes picking fights with other dogs and crapping in the neighbors’ lawns. One creature’s freedom can be another one’s nightmare.
Still, I cast no judgement on my neighbor’s perspective. I absolutely get where he’s coming from. It was this same belief that led me several years ago to releasing our family’s rabbit, Rosie, after having her in our care for only a few weeks. With large brown eyes and luxurious chestnut fur, the kids and I adored her. But every time we took her out of her hutch to play with her in our backyard, she’d scratch her way out of our arms and head for the trees. And anytime she wasn’t fighting for her freedom, she was huddled in the corner of her hutch looking forlorn and depressed.
I’d finally had enough.
I sat the kids down and explained to them that bunnies were meant to be free. They weren’t meant to live in stiff cages. I made such a performance of it all that by the end the kids jumped up with emancipatory zeal, and we all marched off to Rosie’s hutch and freed our downy prisoner back into the arms of Mother Nature. In the weeks following her release, we saw her from time to time, as she made a little home for herself under our porch. “She looks so happy,” the kids would say, and they weren’t imagining it. Rosie had a new glint in her eye.
But then one day, we realized we hadn’t seen her in a really long time. It was time for another sit down conversation about the food chain and how, Rosie, as a bunny, was at the bottom of it. “So you mean something ate her?” my son asked, eyes wide with horror.
“Well, it’s a possibility,” I confessed. “But imagine how happy she was leading up to it! She was gonna die, eventually, but remember how alive she looked every time we saw her before that?”
The kids nodded and wiped their eyes. “She was really happy,” they admitted with sad smiles. And that’s how the story went from that point onwards. Whenever Rosie came up in conversation, they’d say, “Yeah, Rosie probably got ate by a fox, but remember how happy she was before that?” I’m still on the fence as to whether I handled that the best way possible, but it is what it is.
However, I do know that such a conversation would not quell my children’s grief if Winnie met her demise while on my watch (or lack there of it.) I’ve thought of this before. I actually think of it every time I’m frantically calling her name or roaming the neighborhood in search of her. I imagine stumbling upon her ravaged body and knowing that somehow I will have to break this news to my children. It won’t be sad smiles and acquiescence. It will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Grief of biblical proportions.
It is time to make a little adjustment to my dog parenting.
This morning after Shawn left the house with our youngest two babes on an impromptu, before-school coffeeshop run, I bore the job of letting Winnie out for her morning potty break. No, Shawn wasn’t there to guilt me with his exasperation at being a negligent overseer, but nonetheless, I rose to the task like a responsible dog mom. Donning my thick red coat and my warm hiking boots, I accompanied Winnie out into the wintry morning. While I trudged down the driveway towards the backyard, she ran ahead of me—no regard for the single-digit temperatures enveloping us— and straight into the forest.
Today, I watched her.
Well, I nagged and watched her.
“Winnie, go potty!” I demanded, which she ignored. She only follows her full repetoire of commands for Shawn. She’ll give me “Stay!” on a consistent basis, and I’m happy with that. In the forest she trotted around and sniffed at the trunk of this tree and under that leaf pile. Occasionally, she stopped and perked her ears, her whole body in a stance of listening. Then, she lowered her nose to the ground and proceeded onward. She carried on like this for ten minutes, the flurry of action culminating when a small herd of deer bounded out of a thicket, sending her darting in a frenzy back and forth along their two lines of escape.
And all the time, I watched.
She didn’t care that I was there occasionally hounding her, trying to hurry her up and redirect her wanderings. Sometimes she’d listen to me, if it suited her, and sometimes she didn’t. But she’s a pack dog, so when she had her fill and noticed that I was only a faint shape she could see through a distant web of branches, she turned back around and galloped back to me, that smile of delight on her lips.
And you know what else? I loved watching her. I’m not breaking new philosophical ground with this thought, but you can actually receive so much joy just from watching someone else have a good time. Winnie’s delight became my own. I felt a little lighter as we walked back to the house. I felt playful. Curious. What an unexpected gift on this cold, blustery morning.
Friends, joy, indeed, is contagious.
What about you? When have you recently “caught” someone else’s joy? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
This is how I feel about the toddlers at church--their joy is so simple and pure, it lifts my spirits every time.
If you haven’t already, you must read Mary Oliver’s “The Dog has Run Off Again.” I read it soon after I read your story here and thought I’d come back to share it with you.