Here’s the moment when I knew. Juliet — the wiry lab-mutt we’d recently adopted from the pound — raced into our bedroom. In her enthusiasm, her gangly paws entangled a loose rug and she lost her footing. She catapulted through the air, an ebony mass of fur soaring toward the bed where our three-week old infant was lying flat as a Kansas pancake. It happened so quickly that all I could do was watch in fear as she plowed toward our 7-pound baby.
It was over in a split second. Somehow, in all of Juliet’s airborne frenzy, she managed to retain awareness of that speck of life beneath her and landed four paws safely around the baby. That’s when I knew everything would be fine. We parked the baby’s bassinet atop Juliet’s crate — our earliest iteration of bunk beds — and the love affair began.
A dog is both Rorschach and receptacle, a two-way highway for love unbounded and unadulterated. In a world that relentlessly enforces limits, the love of a pet is a refuge for unconstrained emotion, especially for a child.
It became even more apparent as Juliet aged. That infant on the bed is finishing high school, with two other teenagers right behind. While adolescents tend to be blithely self-centered in all manner of human interaction, when it came to Juliet, my three were solicitous, tender and concerned. They treated her as a treasured child whose every fault could be forgiven and whose every personality quirk was lauded like a work of Mozart, retold with the pride of parentage.
To read more on this story, click here: Nursing Juliet
FOLLOW US!
