How we got a puppy and lived to regret it
Eight weeks wondering what the hell we've done
Last week, our 15-week-old puppy Macaroni sat down on a shelf like it was a seat. To my relief, I was able to grab my phone quickly enough to capture the moment. I needed to get it on film, so to speak, because otherwise, it wasn’t enough to just see the insane adorableness happen before my own eyes. I wanted proof, the ability to show other people, the confirmation that getting this dog wasn’t complete insanity on my husband’s and my part.
See, the thing is, we are dog people but until 7 weeks ago, we did not have a dog. I felt nearly naked walking through Hampstead Heath without one of my own. We envisioned ourselves bringing a dog on rambles through this wild part of London and cuddling up with her on the couch at night. I pictured belly rubs and snuggles and when we have a family of our own one day, the dog and baby becoming fast friends.
And yet. As is so often the case, expectations and reality turn out to be completely different planets. About two weeks into getting Macaroni, I first heard from someone else about how horrible having a puppy was. I had trekked to our local coffee shop for an oat milk flat white and sat with her in the sling we had purchased so she could go on socialization outings before she was fully vaccinated. I sat there, exhausted and covered in fresh scratches from her sharp puppy teeth, feeling emptied out. A woman sat down nearby with the cutest poodle I’ve ever seen, who sat serenely, ignoring Mackie. The woman asked me how things were going and I told her the truth: We were regretting the decision. She laughed and told me that a friend of hers still referred to the month she’d gotten her puppy as Black January.
When we moved to London last April, it seemed like the time was right to start looking for a dog. While visiting, my mom and I met someone with a young puppy at a bakery in East London. I told them we were looking, and she recommended their breeder. I sent an email in early June to inquire about spots in an upcoming litter and after approval by the breeder, got a spot in the next litter. ‘Matings have taken place,’ she wrote, adding that she’d confirm in a few weeks once the first ultrasound appointment happened. But that dog, nor the subsequent one became pregnant. It wasn’t until a few days after Christmas that we learned that Florence was pregnant and the puppies would be born a month later. By that point, we’d spent six months imagining Macaroni, discussing how we’d take her to the pub after a long jaunt on the Heath. It was almost as though I could see her beside me at points sniffing curiously, walking calmly. Ah…ha! Ha!
What I saw was pure fiction, as anyone reading this who has had a puppy will know. I did not picture the swift destruction of the apartment we’d finally gotten into a decent place, trekking up and down from the third floor ten times a day, attempting to mop up pee—so much pee—before she can wrench the cloth from my hand, and instant crying whenever I leave the room.
Her play-biting got so bad that we booked a private session with a trainer in advance of our obedience classes, who told us that we needed to adopt a uniform for being at home: long-sleeved shirts, thick pants, and rainboots. In the home. At all times. So, I a devoted no-shoes-in-the-house person, took to hiding drinking my morning tea on the window ledge—then, the one place in the room she couldn’t reach (see below)—while watching my adorable maniac of a puppy gnaw on my Blundstones. I received texts from friends asking whether we’d considered rehoming the puppy, my dad has offered to take Macaroni off our hands, where, I can’t deny, she would thrive with a large yard and another doodle to play with. But, still, we cling to the idea that one day she will no longer be a puppy, which is to say a menace, but will be the dog we imagined. When people on the street say she’s cute and I joke that they can take her, they tell me that I’ll miss these times. And I can say with certainty: I will not. I am not cut out for this. I yearn to be at my desk, working on my dissertation or writing this newsletter or doing anything other than pulling book after book out of her mouth.
Though I ‘knew’ it would be hard work, I can also say I truly had ZERO idea. How is this possible?
I found an answer in philosopher L.A. Paul’s work on ‘transformative experience,’ she wrote about in ‘What you can’t expect when you’re expecting’, an article that assessed the irrational nature of choices made based on a fundamental lack of knowledge. In the paper, Paul discusses how someone who is making a decision about whether to become a parent or not makes that choice based on how they think their future self will feel as a parent, which she argues is irrational given that one cannot know what the future self will feel as someone who has had a child. This isn’t to say that one shouldn’t imagine oneself as a parent as part of the decision-making process (indeed, this is part of what my master’s research is based on), but that one is in an ‘impoverished epistemic situation’1 because you cannot know ‘what emotions, beliefs, desires, and dispositions’ you will have once you have gone through an experience that is both ‘epistemically…and personally transformative’2. Put simply, imaginging your future self in order to make a decision about a major life decision that will change both your knowledge and your self is irrational.
And yet, and yet. We still engage with the future as a matter of routine, whether it is in hope to change our present circumstances for the better, anticipation of risk of negative outcomes, or to dream up possibilities that may or may not come into being. K and I had to imagine ourselves as dog people in order to act. In ignorance, certainly. Irrationally, definitely.
I laugh thinking back to the way we’d reorganized and prepped our apartment for Macaroni to arrive, how we’d diligently read two puppy books in order to ‘prepare’. We bought paper puppy pads to teach her to wee on, which she promply tore up and trotted about with them in her mouth. When she would howl in her crate after we left her to sleep, we urgently ordered the stuffed puppy with a ‘heartbeat’ to mimic her littermates. We thought one bottle of spray to deal with messes and mask the smell would be adequate. Buying seemed our only way to combat the vast gulf between our former selves who’d thought things would be hard and our present selves who were woefully under-resourced. There was hardly a day in the first month we didn’t order something on Amazon, our panic fueling reliance on convenience that comes with a trail of waste.
To say I exclusively regret our getting her is a lie. There were days when I both hated and loved her at the same time. I would watch her sleep and think how cute she was, but the minute she awoke I’d feel dread coupled with fatigue at the hours before she’d take another nap. Every ‘it gets better’ from dog owners on the street was met by my ‘do you want to take her?’
And yet, through caring for her, I have come to love her, and once she was fully vaccinated and could hit the streets with her hilarious trot, I found that the wake times were slightly less dreadful. There are glimmers of perfection, like when she insists on five minutes of belly rubs after waking up from her nap or the curious way she investigates the new-to-her-world.
We have undergone a transformative experience in becoming dog owners, and I am only beginning to say I don’t wish it were otherwise. It has brought to my attention the gulf between people on opposite epistemic sides of an experience. I have wondered whether I could have truly heard and understood someone in my position saying to past-me the truth of the situation. Would I have believed that I’d barely get anything done in the most important time of my master’s degree while juggling freelance work? Would I have understood how much getting a puppy would challenge my belief that becoming a parent is a good idea for me?
Throughout all of this, I have wondered what pondering any potential transformative experience can tell us. Would the dream of life in the countryside feel as magical as it seems? Is that new job going to be as good you’ve dreamed? Can buying a car really make life that much easier? Seen through L.A. Paul’s lens, any experience becomes ripe for investigation, not so much to prevent decision making but to understand that at its core, choosing is a leap of faith.
I’m not sure what I would say to someone who told me that they were getting an eight-week-old puppy. I might ask if they could wait until 11 weeks, because many dog owners we know had an easier time getting their dog at that age. I would certainly counsel them to take vacation if possible and budget five times the amount of money they anticipated spending. But then I would show them pictures of Macaroni, because for all the pain, I have found love for her in the care. I would laugh with them about her silly personality and feel grateful for the photos as tokens of the experience, as I transformed my epistemic ignorance into experiential knowledge. That I needed the phone as ballast during the past eight weeks is simply what it is. I needed podcasts for long hours of caring for her while wishing I could be working, FaceTime to show my far-away family her antics, and the camera to document the horror and the joy.
Next time I’ll be back with a list of everything we bought for Macaroni, ranked from worst to best for any future puppy parents out there.
Paul, L.A. (2015) ‘What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting’, Res Philosophica, 92 (2), p. 155
ibid, p. 156
Reminds me so much of the early days with our sheepadoodle. It was horrible- and apartments make potty training a puppy THAT much harder. We were so exhausted and my partner threatened to take her back more than once. Now she’s 5 1/2, the LITERAL LIGHT OF OUR LIVES, and we can’t imagine life without her. But those early months were completely brutal. Hang in there!!
I love the extrapolation to other circumstances and, as always, your great sense of humor. The photos are epic, too!