On puppies, potty training, being frazzled, empathy and–oh, yeah–writing

Dear Nancy:

It’s early Sunday morning, about 6:30, and I’ve been up half an hour already. I’ve vacuumed the puppy’s playpen, fed the puppy, taken the puppy out for peeing, given the puppy heartworm medication, and laid down pee-worthy newspaper that the puppy is now shredding vigorously.  I also got up at 1:00 and 4:00 for pee breaks and in dreams in between potty outings I was using a squeegee to rake suspicious looking wetness out of a rug I used to own.  And now, at 6:30, I’m sitting down with a first cup of coffee to write you.

I’m teetering a little on an edge. I’m somewhere between exhaustion and exhilaration.

I have, of course, long wanted a dog. I mourned after Jenkins and Rufus, my two little dog-companions of some sixteen years, passed away in 2008.  Animals meet an absence in me, a dark hole left from childhood and from being a mother who surrendered a child to adoption. I love their animal-souls.  Some days I fancy they are my familiars, and I often trust them much more readily than I do people.  And the puppy chasing a blue butterfly down the sidewalk yesterday.  Well, that just did it for me.

As this first week of adoption has passed, I have reflected on one thing you said in your last letter to me. You were talking about cooking and food, but you were also talking about taking care of yourself.  Is adopting a puppy-child taking care of myself, my writer-self? Or have I adopted one more thing in an endless list (social media, television, fretting, my favorite Greek yogurt on a stick, answering emails promptly, ad infinitum) to keep me from The Word?

I mean, this puppy business makes me feel, on the one hand, exactly how a friend described herself, years back, in relation to caring for her newborn. “I didn’t even have time alone to take a shower.”  No less, I could say, have I had uninterrupted time to work on the seventh revision of my novel.  Have I opened the door to “momishness,” as Lauren Sandler describes it in One and Only, a book about writing and having children.  Momishness:  a condition that apparently includes “kitchens, sinks, and the wiping down of small, grubby humans.”  What did one male graduate student call writing that was about such matters?  Domestic dramas involving baby diapers.  Uh-huh.

That is only one road diverged in the proverbial yellow wood. As Lauren Sandler describes mothering, it is also:  “elevated fulfillment….the desire to love deeply and intimately…to never turn away from a human experience.”

I’m feeling my way in this early morning puppy-care-fog, but most days I don’t want either path. The resentment toward kitchens and sinks and bodily fluids, nor “elevated fulfillment.”  I want some land between.  What do I call that place without sounding loopier than this early Sunday morning makes me feel?

I come back to your phrase. Taking care of myself.  Taking care.  Care. I have, over the years, defined and rediscovered and forgotten and remembered that word over and over and over.

Care. My life is a quilt of made of the ways I have taken care.  Take care out on them roads, my grandmother would say as I set out to drive the miles back to Virginia or Georgia, to Charlottesville or Lynchburg or Athens or Milledgeville, to all the places I’ve lived and worked.  Care. Neat comments in the margins of my student’s essays.  Letters to them about observing and answering and questioning.  Care.  I teeter down a hallway toward the bathroom in some bar, careful not to slip and tumble after my fourth glass of wine.  Care.  Moving slowly toward love, being cautious, protective, giving enough, but holding back, safe.  Care. I used to need the house completely empty on a Saturday, so I could write.  Had to have my then-lover head to a coffee shop and stay there until I was finished for the day.  Care. I’ve learned, a former boss once told me, never to be dependent on anyone.  Care.  No, I say, with more and more vehemence these days.  Or yes.  This is what I want, what I do not want.  Care.  How carefully do we tread the halls of academe, the pages of the book, the moral compass of our lives?  Care.  I reach again and again toward the heart, the deepest place, words that are not afraid to say themselves.  Fierce.  Blunt.  Politic.  Real.  Care.  The face of a lover, sleeping, how the eyes move in sleep.  The friend who said that having his first child was about “making the soul more fluid.”  Care. Scatter seeds. Water lightly.  Wait for sunlight.

This early morning as I write you this little animal, yellow-dog-child, is asleep in a playpen beside me as I write. I am tired, irritable, anxious that the pages ahead will be written, will be written well.  I watch the puppy’s black eyes open, shut.  She twitches in sleep as I finish this letter.  She wakes, ready to go outside one more time.  I touch her warm body, feel her breathing.

As Rebecca Meade says in a 2013 NYT article, “Writers and the Optimal Child-Count Spectrum,” “a writer’s true success—in the sense of her ability to write something original and meaningful—also depends upon the range of her imagination, the precision of her critical faculties, and, crucially, the extent of her capacity for empathy.”

Love,

Karen