An Unconventional Motherhood

When I was young, I pictured myself a lot like my mother: a stay-at-home mom with two kids (one boy, one girl), a cocker spaniel, and a husband to support me. I would fall in love in college. We would live in a nice suburb. The children would go to private school.

I did fall in love in college. Then I fell out of love and moved to decidedly urban areas as I struggled to figure out what to do with my life, career-wise. I couldn’t be a stay-at-home mom. After all, I had no kids to mother and no husband to pay the bills. I stumbled along in low impact jobs while my contemporaries were earning six figures as financial analysts. I felt behind in the game of life and a little like a failure. I was 35 before I found myself saying “I do” in front of family and friends and wondering if it was too late for kids.

But before I knew it a child came. In the form of a black-brindle French bulldog, a little girl caught me by storm. Her personality far exceeding the size of her 20-pound frame, she is a symphony of snorts, chortles, and harrumphs. Each note takes on a different meaning. “Can we get in bed now?” “I just went potty, please pick it up.” “I love you utterly and completely. You are the sun, the moon, the stars. Now, rub my belly.”

Each day, she wiggles her way deeper into my heart. She hops like a gazelle down the hall when I come home. She nestles up next to me when I go to bed at night. She is asleep in my lap and snoring softly as I write this.

Luca.

Remember the scene in “Raising Arizona” when Holly Hunter holds her newly abducted baby for the first time and a split second later bursts into sobs? “I love him so much!!!” she wails. I feel this surge of affection and emotion when I think of my dog.

I get sad when I leave her for work each day. I rush home to be with her. I make up little songs about her. Surely if she were my own species, I would be incapacitated with love.

I am acutely aware of what is expected in the circle of life: you grow up, reproduce to ensure continuation, and die knowing that the circle goes on. Our bodies were physically made for it. Evolution has geared survival toward it. And society, in the form of winking aunts and elbow-nudging uncles, has been pressuring us into it for ages. It is the way of the world.

It makes me wonder:  am I a failure to be a mother without children?

Yet Luca is in many ways my baby. I care for her. I love her. I teach her things. But unlike real children, she does not storm into her room and tell me she hates me before slamming the door in my face. She does not require a trust fund to pay for her education. She does not need to know about the perils of drug use and unprotected sex before the age of 14.

All the “real" parents out there must be smiling knowingly to themselves because they also know she does not wrap her little fingers around my pinky or clap when may face reappears from behind my hands as I exclaim, “peek-a-boo!” I know it sounds crazy and incredibly naïve, but she is the perfect child and in some bizarre way, she brings out the best mother in me.

So what if she’s a dog? Motherhood is less about whom we mother and more about the act of nurturing. It may not be what I pictured for myself years ago, but it’s my family. And I’m a damn good mom.