Being a Doggy Mama - Breaking point

 

Many year's ago - I must've been 12 or so years old - I went to stay with my sister while her husband was away on a business trip.  She'd just had her first baby.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing her in the living room, watching her wide-awake son playing with toys on the carpet, crying her eyes out.

I was confused by what I saw, and slunk back to bed.

When I was a kid, if there was something I didn't understand, it stayed stored in my memory in the "Don't get it - Gather more data" file.

Sometimes I'd ask someone a question to get the answer, sometimes I'd think it through, and sometimes I just kept my mouth shut, instinctively knowing that I couldn't ask an adult about it, and that, someday, I'd get it.

Case in point:  I used to read a lot of Judy Blume.  I remember one scene where the female protagonist was kissing the boy of her dreams and she got scared, telling the reader that she felt something hard and knew it wasn't his keys.  It took at least 3 years till I understood that one.  

Hey - don't mock me!

I read WAY above my age range.

Anyway, I didn't get why my sister was sitting there, like a crumpled tissue, slumped in the lounge chair, sniffing.

Over the years, I've seen movies about being a mother, talked to friends, read books.  But I'll never understand the pain and emotion involved in giving birth to a child, never feel what it is like to breast-feed a baby, never go through the wrench of empty nest syndrome.

But there is one thing I DO get now.

I get that you can be so tired that you open the fridge instead of the trash can to throw away snotty tissues, that you are unreasonably tetchy with your husband and that you can actually get to the point where you wonder what the hell you got yourself into, doubt you can cope, and just want to sit down, put your head in your hands as if you are the overacting, big-haired, pancake-makeup-faced lead in a daytime soap opera, and cry, cry, cry.

I didn't actually do it.  But I thought about doing it.  My nose got tickly, my lower lip pouted, and tears almost came.

Still, it's only my third sleepless night with the puppy, so you never know.

That little bundle of warm, milky, chocolaty goodness may break me yet.