Her Turn

(Or, Life with Our Pack)

It happened so quickly, and if I’m telling the whole truth, it happened twice.

I turned to fix a piece of art on the front wall in the living room, and right at that moment, Kelsey, the kind and talented woman hired to help clean our home, reached for the vacuum, and Zara lunged.

She didn’t bite, but she lunged and growled, and while I was able to swoop in and usher her upstairs without an issue, it’s the second week in a row it’s happened.

Typically, I’m not home when Kelsey is here, and the dogs have zero issues with her and her team coming into the home and doing whatever the home calls for. But for the last two weeks, I have been here, and it’s been a serious issue.

Zara also growls whenever Julian, Todd’s 23-year-old son, comes home. Though he says it’s always significantly less when I’m not home.

Zara is a rescue who, like Briggs and me, has suffered many changes over the last two years. She also had to suffer the moves, long-ish periods without me, and my perpetually changing medical state.

All things considered, she’s been great. She has allowed me to be entirely consumed by my health and then Briggs’s for these past two catastrophic years.

But now, she’s clearly telling me she needs more from me.

It’s her turn.

And that’s more than fair.

Still, yesterday, confronting the fact that I’m back to needing to hire a trainer, put her on anxiety meds, and be far more consistent with her day-to-day schedule made me feel like a horrible dog mom.

On the way to the grocery store, I was overrun with fear about having to separate her from my family and falling so short of being the family she needs.

Before I let fear immobilize me, I called Todd. He’s away on a Jeep trip. I confessed how my thoughts were terrorizing me, and he brought me back to truth:

“That’s not where we are. We are taking next steps to make sure Zara gets everything she needs from our pack.”

We are a pack.

That’s what support sounds and feels like.

It’s telling the truth when my brain has moved into self-inflicted imaginary terror, while also telling the truth about the solid, actionable steps we can take to prevent the worst things from getting anywhere close to this life.

Our life.

I can still get scared and get ahead of myself.

And we can have a plan.

These aren’t two opposites being true at the same time.

These are simply two truths.