Furbaby Fever

I love my dog but I am not his mother

By Rachael Maddux
Illustration by Tim Enthoven

For years before my husband and I adopted Charles Darwin, a mutt who we mostly call Charlie, I had these dreams where I discovered a hidden room in my house full of cats and dogs that I had forgotten to take care of so they’d all turned into these horrible skeletal things—not dead yet, just angry and taunting me with their gauntness. The root of this anxiety was comically unsubtle, but the sickly shameful feeling I woke up with every morning was real and I wanted to shake it. And since we got Charlie I have, for the most part.

When you get a dog people think it’s because you want a baby. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve told someone about how Joe or I reacted to something the dog did, and whoever I’m talking to has said, “Oh, that’s good to know.” And then they pause, because they think I know what they’re trying to say, and I do know but I want to make them say it: “You know, for when you have babies.”

I can’t deny that I thought it’d be good to figure out if I had the ability to care for another living creature before I made any major decisions on the personal reproduction front. But I’m pretty sure that I’ve learned as much about parenthood from dog-ownership as I learned from the sugar baby I was made to carry around in the sixth grade, which amounts to not very much except they are much heavier than they look.

Still, there seems to be this idea that my purchase of multiple Kong-brand items is tantamount to registering for a breast pump. Or, stranger yet—that my dog himself is some kind of ersatz infant.

Joe and I decided long ago that if we ever got a dog we would not refer to ourselves as its “mom” and “dad,” that it would not be our “baby” or our “furkid,” and that it absolutely would not be our “furbaby.” When we got Charlie we casually made this preference known to our families. We each kept our own name when we got married a few years back, which was such a non-issue I don’t even remember having the conversation with our folks. But our non-dog-parentage was a harder sell.

“Can I still be Grandma?” Joe’s mom asked; we told her sure, hoping it’d tide her over. My grandmother also dubbed herself Grandma. (My other grandmother, when I told her we got a dog, just sighed and said, “Well, just don’t forget to have kids. Some people, you know, they get a dog and they just forget!” This complicates this piece’s premise so I am putting it here in parentheses where it won’t get in the way.)

There is just one dog/baby equivalence I can see: The eeriness of having a creature in your ongoing care, of being its closest companion in the world, yet having no access to anything beyond its outward displays. Joe and I now spend an embarrassing amount of time asking variations on idiotic questions: Who’s the Charlie, who’s the buddy, who’s the best buddy, who’s the sweetest best buddy, etc. Like parents babbling over an infant, we ask with the same mix of awareness that Charlie won’t/can’t reply and expectation that he might anyway, if the questions are asked enough times and in a ridiculous enough voice.

The idea that Charlie has any sort of personal interiority is my one major indulgence as a pet owner. (I haven’t bought him a single outfit in the four months he has been in my care, so I think I’m owed this much.) Still I know that the biggest difference between a baby and a dog is that, one day, the baby will talk back. With a baby, eventually your efforts to uphold your end of the caretaking bargain will result in an independently functioning human being who can answer the questions that used to be only rhetorical, or who can laugh or ignore them, or ask their own. And not only will this creature eventually no longer depend upon you, but (if all goes as it should) it will continue to exist even when you are long past vestigial, even after you’re dead and gone. That is part of the deal—you leave them behind.

With a dog, though, your life together is lived in a single mode. I don’t take care of Charlie now in hopes that he will one day grow into a kind, intelligent, capable being who will hopefully produce little versions of himself for me to obsess over in my dotage. (For one, he has no balls.) What we have now is what we will have forever, or at least for 10 or 12 years, if we’re lucky. At some point he will be dead and I will still be here, right where I started when I went out trying to fill that stupid dog-shaped hole in my heart that just wound up bottoming out and making room for 10 more. And he will have never, ever been my baby.

But for now he’s here and we love him like the dog that he is. At last I’ve stopped having those dreams about forgetting to feed hidden rooms full of zombie pets. Instead I am having dreams about forgetting to feed zombie babies. “Nice try!” I tell my brain, before ripping it up in little pieces and feeding it to the dog one by one.

Follow us on Twitter

Like us on Facebook

Subscribe to our newsletter