Puppy love
Motherhood in miniature
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My puppy is an adorable agent of anarchy. My girlfriends with small children are enjoying this because they know all about anarchy.
I tell them about 1 a.m. wake-ups and piles of laundry and tripping over toys. Mochi climbs me like a jungle gym and follows me into the bathroom, turning a simple trip to Trader Joe’s into a blessed hour alone. He dumps his ball of food down the stairs the minute I join a video call and falls sick the minute my partner is away. My life, once my own, is now ruled by a tiny tyrant.
I tell my friends, too, that when Mochi snuggles in my lap, soft and trusting, I forgive him everything. When he finally falls asleep, I pull up photos on my phone and marvel at how fast he’s grown. When he rockets into my arms each morning and snuffles his baby breath on my neck, I can’t imagine waking without him. How empty the house would be, and how cold.
“Yes,” my friends say, “that’s what it feels like to be a mother.”
I wrestle with the word mother. “Did you trouble mommy today?” my partner asks Mochi when he gets home. “How is your baby doing?” the vet says when I bring Mochi in.
These questions feel right, but I answer them softly, afraid of being judged. I hear other voices that say a dog is not a child and I have no right to call myself a mother. When coworkers complain of sick kids and canceled plans, I think “me too,” but say nothing.
When Mochi was small, I mentioned on a work call how sick he was. I’d waited to take him to the vet, unsure if it was serious. “You’d never wait that long to take a kid to a doctor,” my coworker replied. “People say having dogs is like having kids, but it’s not.” He didn’t mean to be harsh, but I recoiled from what I heard as the underlying message: Raising a puppy isn’t parenting. You have no right to find this so hard.
Of course I know the difference between a puppy and a baby. I did not birth this creature and I won’t send him to college. Mochi will never demand bedtime stories with dragons or melt down because I opened his banana the wrong way. He is not a child, nor do I want him to be. The bleary early weeks confirmed my choice on that score; this is enough caregiving for me.
Instead, I am raising a cuddle muppet with simple needs: a soft bed, a stray sock, the chance to sniff the news of the neighborhood. Above all, Mochi wants to live in my lap. He looks up at me with adoring eyes and offers me his warm belly to rub. Without words, he says: Tell me you love me. Tell me again.
Before I got a dog, I couldn’t understand why my friends were so smitten with theirs, or why we had to pick rentals and restaurants that allowed pets. I didn’t get why the dogs piled into the back seat on car trips and flopped at our feet during dinner. I was willing to accommodate my friends’ kids, but resented planning around pups. After all, I told myself, “It’s just a dog.”
Then I got my own. As we walk up the street, Mochi wiggles at everyone we pass like a hug-seeking missile. Schoolchildren press against the playground fence to pet him. A woman at a coffee shop guides her elderly father's hand into Mochi’s soft fur. Stone-faced commuters break into grins and squat on the sidewalk to collect their kisses. “Thank you, I needed that today,” they tell him.
As I watch the joy Mochi brings, I gradually realize that I’m selling my own experiences short. I’ve been so busy comparing Mochi to what he isn’t that I’m not letting myself appreciate what he is. By telling myself he’s “just a dog,” I’m telling myself that caring for a pet is less valid than caring for a child. If Mochi is not a baby, by this logic, then I cannot be a mother.
But when we rank our experiences relative to others, we deny ourselves permission to feel. Just because an experience is different doesn’t make the feelings less real. A puppy is different from a baby, but it’s all still love. There is no hierarchy. There are many ways to care for small creatures, and they’re not in competition.
On a recent morning, Mochi and I woke to surprise snow coating the grungy city in fluffy white. The neighborhood kids and pups trooped to the park en masse to frolic. The kids pelted each other with snowballs and built snowmen with carrot noses. Mochi romped through the drifts, chomping on stray carrots and collecting snowballs in his fur.
In this meadow of delight, Mochi met a little girl his own size with lake-blue eyes and kitten mittens. With a nod from her mother, I knelt down and placed a dog treat in her mitten. When Mochi snuffled it up, her face lit up with a joy that caught me off guard. Without words, she said: Look what the puppy did! Do it again!
I placed another treat in her outstretched hand. Her mother and I both beamed as we watched a tiny dog and tiny human transported by their first snow and each other.
One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!
Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
Previous posts on this topic:
Women without children
Our language for women without children is still defined by the absence of them. We are either sadly “childless” or avidly “childfree.” But I am not less without a child, nor do I seek to be free of them. I don’t have to bring a child into the world to love the ones that are already here.
The child I never had
The choice to have a child cannot be unmade, and at a certain age you lose the chance to choose at all. I’m 40 now, and that time is nearing, if not already passed. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the life I didn’t choose, or that didn’t choose me. My almost-life is always with me.
As you know I had two dogs before having two boys; I told folks that dogs taught me two major lessons that helped me with a baby: (1) having another being drive many of my scheduling decisions and life choices, and (2) having to get comfortable dealing with the bodily fluids of another mammal 🤣
As I'm older and have both kids and pets - anyone who thinks they get to decide who else is a parent needs to reassess their priorities. Plant mom, dog mom, human mom ... If you are taking responsibility for the life of another living thing, congrats and thank you.
Love the piece, Liz. We've had a dog for four years now and everything you said resonates. I'm currently on vacation in Tokyo, and am having a great time, but am missing my dog more than anything. My wife and I are also about to have our first child and I'm curious to see how that'll change things. Many friends tell us we'll forget about our dog, but I just can't see that happening. Hope you're well. I've loved following your writings.