My dog made over my life

And in the process, she saved it, too

The night before I was to pick up my puppy felt like Christmas Eve. Like many prior actual Christmas Eves, I was steeped in anxiety and attempting to douse it with alcohol. It was July 11, 2020 and while the world was settling into a pandemic, I was sliding toward a mental health crisis but didn’t yet know it. 

This wasn’t just any time period in history, and this was not just any puppy. I was not equipped for either circumstance. Know that everything has worked out fine, and my 4 year old Akita is happy and well adjusted. Yes. An Akita. I had never had a dog before, I lived in a downtown condo, it was unknown what the pandemic would bring, I was drinking more than ever, and I decided to get an American Akita. The breed which is often an exclusion to getting renter’s insurance. I still do not have a rational explanation for why I chose this breed, so I have to believe I was divinely led.

Rei and "Kitty", then and now

Before the pandemic, I traveled so much that my iPhone thought I lived at the airport. I would wake up and it would report. “Traffic is heavy today, it will take you 30 minutes to get to work”, showing me the traffic from downtown Seattle to SeaTac airport. But when the initial reported two week shutdown turned into an indefinite work from home situation, my fantasy of having a dog, or maybe more honestly just someone to love me unconditionally, started nagging me big time. I had always had cats as an adult, but at the time, I didn’t even have a cat. 

While I am not certain it is the reason he broke up with me at the start of the pandemic, starting in about 2019, my then boyfriend would embarrassingly ask various dog owner, “Can my girlfriend pet your dog?” I guess he had started noticing my attention was tuned more into the random Bernese Mountain Dog or Husky we passed on the street than into the latest business venture he was relaying.

On the morning of Gotcha Day (I was such a newbie to dog parenthood, I didn’t even know what that was then), my daughter, son and I got in my Mini and drove south on I-5 to a PetSmart parking lot in a strip mall. I had naturally drank some wine to ease my expectant mom anxiety, so I had my 18 year old son drive. There were three other puppy parents and assorted family members from the Seattle area there to meet the breeder, who had driven over from Eastern Washington. 

It was like I imagine a hospital waiting room would be on a busy night in the maternity ward circa 1955, minus the cigars. Lots of excited chatter and asking about names and (fur) siblings. My daughter and I lined up, giddy - because PUPPIES! - to make the final payment via PayPal and receive a cute sparkly Lisa Frank-ish folder with the official puppy papers. Then the breeder’s four daughters, organized in an assembly line of blond adorableness, passed the chubby puppies from somewhere inside the gold Chevy Tahoe down the little girl arm chute until each pup met her parents (the entire litter of 9 was female). When Rei’s solid furry body was placed in my arms, I buried my nose in between her little ears and breathed her in. She was real and she was mine.

In my mental health decline and given my emotional dependence on alcohol, I ‘decided’ to drink more when we got her back to the condo. I had read the puppy parent books, bought all the stuff, had a nice blanket and toys waiting for her, but I was completely unprepared emotionally. I felt more anxious than when I brought my first human baby home, which I remember vaguely wondering about, as I could typically tackle any situation without much fear. My sturdy crutch of wine was waiting to prop me up as usual, but going the 250 yards to get outside to the little patch of grass below the building every 2 hours throughout the night was just brutal. 

In my ongoing buzzed and now sleep deprived state, I lost my phone somewhere in that patch of grass. In the morning, seeing it had disappeared, I tracked it down to a part of the city a few miles away on the FindMy app, but contemplating leaving my puppy or taking her with me somehow across town to confront God knows who to demand my phone back was just too much.

Instead, I got online and ordered a new phone to be delivered. I was afraid to leave her, even to take a shower or make a sandwich. I would just look at her sad deep brown eyes and know in my heart I had already failed her. But I had faced brutal ultramarathons with just a pair of running shoes and my willpower, and I was not going to give up, even if I felt completely in over my head with her. I could tell how much she missed her mother and sisters, so my son and I played and cuddled with her. I put blankets and towels all over the trendy yet cold concrete condo flooring so she had softness to tread on. My sad little world had a bright light, and I was afraid of what would happen if it went out.

When I wrote that I was divinely led to my dog, or she to me, here is what I am currently thinking on the topic. See, today is her birthday, and we celebrated by walking/running around the marina near my house. My life has dramatically changed since this independent, intelligent, belligerent, ridiculous, adorable fluffball came into my life. More accurately, she kicked off a sequence of decisions which pulled me out of a stew of depression, burn out, unprocessed trauma, and regular panic attacks ending in ER visits. She changed me and that saved my life. 

It went something like this. After having her for a week or so, I abruptly quit my job, which was not just a job, but a career as a Senior Director responsible for an organization of 40 people at a major pharmaceutical company. About a month later, I had a mental breakdown which led me to confront the fact that alcohol was only fueling whatever underlying issue was going unaddressed. I was like a porcupine, soft bellied and vulnerable, yet driving everyone close to me away because all I could bring was pain. And as I now understand happens when the Universe intervenes, my internal world became reflected in my external, and my cute little puppy began to torment me, leaving bite marks all over my body which became huge blobs of bruised tissue. Her puppy needle-like fangs brought the psychological bruises from my insides to my outsides where I couldn’t ignore them any longer. 

Between 2021 and 2023, there was one last gasp at working in big pharma, a move from the city to a little town, getting sober, waking up spiritually, intentionally estranging from my mother, and finally an acceptance of my deepest desires for how I spend my precious time on Earth. I am now a person I could have never have imagined being before it came true. I went through my awkward growth stages just as my puppy did. There was the time she put an annoying Shiba Inu in her giant mouth (don’t worry, she didn’t break the skin), and parallel times I bit people’s heads off when I felt unheard. There was her graduation from puppy manners school, and my stringing a few sober months together at the end of 2020 (we would both backslide, but recover). 

We both kept learning and listening to who we truly are in our hearts, not what others wanted us to be. Rei was never meant to be a mild-mannered city dog, an accessory to be had. But then, I was never meant to be the type of woman who has an accessory dog. Give us the space to roam where our curiosity leads us. Love us for all of our intensity as much as for our capacity to hold space when no one else wants to hold space for your pain. That sounds divine to me.