how a poodle changed my life

I was twenty-two years old. I had just started law school. And I was obsessed with one word—poodle.Yep. You read that right. Poodle.But why? Why was I thinking about a curly-haired water dog? I couldn’t have told you. I only knew that the word was there, and that it wouldn’t leave me alone.So I did what any other sane person would do. I started googling.I learnt about the history of poodles. Did you know, for instance, that toy poodles were bred so that they could fit inside the muffs of Russian princesses to keep their hands warm? I learnt about the fact that, unlike most dogs, their hair doesn’t fall out. It just grows and grows and grows until it covers their eyes and ears and feet. And, much to the delight of my friend Kate, I spent hours during lectures looking up pictures of the different colours they came in. (She’s a human rights lawyer now and still laughs about this.)But knowing about them wasn’t enough.I wanted one of my own.So one night, when my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I were eating at our favourite sushi place, I decided to bring it up. “What would you say,” I said, “if I told you I wanted to get a poodle?” (We were living together at the time. He needed to be consulted.) He dropped his chopsticks on the table. The first word out of his mouth was no. He didn’t like them, he said. They were lap dogs, silly dogs. Dogs with funny hairstyles and small brains.***Luckily I had done the research. I managed to refute each of his arguments, one by one. In fact, I could say that attending law school taught me to argue for poodle ownership more than anything else.He held to his opinion. But that didn’t stop me. I started building a case.I looked up reputable breeders and researched rescue organisations. I joined a forum. I read about training, personality, breeding, temperament, grooming. I found a nearby puppy school.It wouldn’t be an over-exaggeration to say that by the time I got my puppy—a brown toy poodle named Delphi—I was completely obsessed.

 

We fetched her at the airport because she had flown in from Cape Town. When we walked up to her crate she was scratching at the bars, whining. I unlatched the door and she leapt into my arms, a ball of brown cotton wool no bigger than a guinea pig. She licked frantically at my cheek as if to say, You’ve saved me!But the truth was quite the opposite.There’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot since then. It’s this thing of paying attention to what you pay attention to. What obsesses you. What won’t leave you alone. The word poodle was like that for me. It came out of nowhere. I had never owned a poodle. No one in my family had ever owned a poodle. I’d never even met a poodle. I’d never thought about them at all. And then, suddenly, out of the blue: poodle, poodle, poodle.It was almost like a didn’t have a choice in the matter.When Delphi was a puppy, I used to take her everywhere with me. For the first month or so, she wouldn’t even walk anywhere on her own four feet. She had to be held. Constantly. She was tiny and the world was big and she was afraid most of the time. So I never left her alone. I took her to coffee shops, to the DVD store, to the bookshop, to university. And whenever I bumped into people I knew, their very first reaction would be something along the lines of: “What is that? Is that a dog? It looks more like a rodent.”Yeah. Turns out, there are a lot of people who don’t like poodles.But you know what? I found that I really didn’t care what people said or thought. Which was a first for me.I loved Delphi. She loved me. That was enough.The most powerful thing about me getting a poodle was this: I was being me. Doing me. For the first time in a long time, perhaps in my life, I had made a choice for myself based on who I was and what I liked. I wanted a dog who slept on my lap while I read, who was clever and loving and clingy. And so I got Delphi. And it didn’t bother me that people didn’t particularly like her.It seems like a small choice, but it was huge for me.Once I could say, “I love my poodle,” I found I could say something else: “I want to write a novel.”























And then I became obsessed with another word. Writer.I started writing.I wrote and wrote and wrote while Delphi lay on my stomach, or tucked between my ankles.I never stopped.About a month before Delphi turned five, I sold my first book.The main character in my debut, THE TURNAWAY GIRLS, is called Delphernia Undersea. She’s not named after my dog—at the time I simply liked the sound of the name and that’s why I chose it—but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there’s a little bit of Delph in my first book. Without her, there probably wouldn’t be a book.She taught me how to say, “I love.”She taught me how to say, “I want.”What could be more life-changing than that? *** It should be noted that my husband is now Delphi's biggest fan. I convinced him; she stole his heart. See photo evidence.