I miss Frankie, I miss Javier, and I miss my home. Maybe if I had gotten Pilot now, when I feel more confident as a caretaker, I’d have been able to make it work. Now, at least I realize that I can be someone’s safe thing, the way I was for Frankie. But now that I will never be a mom, at least to a baby of my own, whose safe thing will I be? Maybe I can find Pilot somehow and get her back. When I first started thinking about having a baby, I read parenting books, but I didn’t do that before I got Pilot. But maybe I should. I’ve discovered the more I teach myself about what I don’t know, the less afraid of life I feel. So yes, I will buy books about separation anxiety in dogs, watch videos, and find a trainer, and then I will search for Pilot. If I find Pilot, I can get a do-over and show her that we can be a family. I’ll tell her I’m sorry I failed her the first time around. We’ll be a family and maybe even move away from here and make our own secret garden upstate.
But now, just like Javi and Frankie, Pilot already has a family. The one who took her when I gave her up. Even with dogs my timing is bad. I’m ready to give up entirely, until on Petfinder one midnight I come across a small, sweet-looking dog named Penny who was just rescued from a kill shelter in Tennessee. I apply for her. Out of twenty-three people I am the first, and I win the dog. It’s raining the day I pick her up and her fur is matted, making her look half her original size; it’s not love at first sight. I’m disappointed by how small she is, but she looks like she’s smiling. Her ears are black and floppy, her body is white, her belly is spotted like a cow, and she has a black pirate-eye. When the foster woman hands me the leash, the dog sweetly licks my calf and then sits patiently beside me. Oh, she’s lovely. I write a check, and the dog and I walk away, neither of us knowing what we’re doing.
As we’re walking to Petco, she licks every leg she passes, trying to see inside swinging purses and absorbing the world with an outsized, limitless curiosity. Even before I’d met her, I had a short list of names, and Busy was one of them, so that when a woman stops and says, “Such a busy little thing,” Busy jumps off the list and onto my brand-new family. Busy Stern.
In the cab on the way home, I am overwhelmed by the silence. I want her to like me, so I start to feed her treats. One after the other. We’re halfway to Fort Greene when Busy throws up all over me. Okay, no more treats. I scoop the vomit up using the Petco bag. Busy and I stare at each other.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
What have I done? Who is this animal? Have I made another mistake?
Like so many of my OkCupid dates, Busy doesn’t look like her picture. Her nose is too pointy. She’s too little. I feel embarrassed by her physical traits as though they were my own. I hate that I feel this way, and by this point in my life I’ve had enough therapy to know I’m treating her like a narcissistic extension of myself, but I don’t know how to stop. In the apartment, I follow the books’ instructions, keeping her on the leash while introducing her to each room, but that seems to overwhelm her. I take her leash off and she follows me to the living room. She stares at me. Then she pees on the floor. I call my friend Laurie.
“She’s not too little?” I ask, standing over the dog.
“No,” Laurie says, standing next to me.
“Too pointy?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe I should take her back. Maybe there’s another, better, bigger dog for me out there.”
“No, this is a really good dog. Look how sweet and loving she is.”
“Look how skinny she is,” I say.
“You’ll fatten her up.”
“I’ll give it two weeks. If I still feel this way in two weeks, I’m taking her back.”
“You won’t. I know dogs. I’m telling you this one is special.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what they said about me, too.”
After Laurie leaves I decide to face the potentially unendurable task of leaving Busy alone. I have a plan of action. Ten minutes, three times a day at first, and then longer increments until she’s used to it. I set up a video camera to film what she does, so I can know when she’s used to it. Yet, with all these things in place, I’m still terrified she’ll be Pilot, second edition. Deep breath. I wonder if I’m more afraid to leave her alone than she is of being left alone, and that’s when something strikes me. With Pilot, the rescue folks told me to do everything with as little fanfare as possible, so that Pilot wouldn’t absorb my panic, and I did that, but I’m realizing now, I did it only through my actions—emotionally I was still a mess. And she must have picked up on that. I was reinforcing the very thing I was afraid would happen. So now, I use all my energy to really not care. Or worry. Ten minutes, big deal.
I walk out the front door and stand on the stairs and soon I hear her crying and I can’t stand it. I feel the pain that’s driving her to cry, I can feel her terror inside me, not knowing where I am, where I’ve gone or why, or if I’ll come back. I want to save her, soothe her, make things better, and my instinct is to comfort her, but I don’t. My mother did this for me, thinking it would help me, but it did the reverse. One thing I know to be true is that in order to get over a fear, you must face it. To save her will reinforce her sense that she needs to be saved, that she should be afraid and sad and panicked without me, the way I felt without my mom, and that’s a feeling I don’t want to pass along as my legacy. I didn’t want that for Frankie, and I don’t want it for an animal. I can hear her cries all the way from the lobby, so I force myself to leave the building and walk around the block, taking in the early July heat, and when I return she is still crying. I spend the rest of the day, and the week, leaving and returning, leaving and returning, in longer and longer increments.
At first she sits by the door and cries. Then, after a few days, her cries fade to whines. Toward the end of the week she whines less but continues to wait by the front door. Eventually, she heads toward the living room when I leave and waits for me on the couch. And by the end of the next week, once she realizes I’m gone, she goes into the living room, grazes her toy basket, pulls something out, and begins flinging it from one side of the room to the other, racing after it. My sweet, vulnerable little dog is entertaining herself, and I’m proud that I have been able to train someone to be self-reliant, to trust that when I leave, I always return.
Being able to do for Busy what I needed someone to do for me fills me with a certainty and groundedness I’ve felt only with Frankie. There’s a hole in my heart and Busy seems to fit it perfectly. Now I know what it looks like to grow free from panic. I know how to do this, I think.
Busy is patient and wildly affectionate. She’s easygoing yet playful. She’s not at all like Pilot, and, unlike me, she’s quick to learn and easy to teach. She is my true complement. Where I am a hyperactive New Yorker, she is West Coast calm; where I am always in a rush and tossing back coffees, she is a leisurely European taking time with her espresso. But we are both eager to please, both dislike sudden lunges—by dogs or people—in our direction, and both dislike being left behind.
At the farmers’ market I introduce her to everyone, and I feel a sense of family fulfillment I haven’t felt since Javi and Frankie. At the dog park I imagine she’s me as a kid, and I do what I wish had been done for me: I’m consistent. I stand in one place. I make sure she knows that every single time she turns back to check on me, I will be exactly where she left me. I don’t want my concerns to become Busy’s, and if she’s to take her cues from me, my cues must be steady and calm, even if I’m faking it. When I’m hosting Happy Ending, I set the tone for the entire night. From the second I step onstage, my energy and presence matter, because they tell the audience how to feel, just the way a parent’s energy and presence tell their child how to feel. If I’m strong and assured, the audience won’t worry about me, or the show, or themselves; they’ll be able to focus and be present. But when I’m nervous, they’re nervous and the show suffers; and over the course of the night I watch in horror as it grows into an insecure teen, awkward and constantly angling for reassurance.
Over my life I’ve worried so much and feared so many things, and though many of those things actually happened, here I am, still alive, having survived what I thought I couldn’t. I didn’t turn out the way I thought I would: I didn’t get married and I didn’t have kids, and the not-having didn’t kill me either.
As I’m watching Busy learn to enjoy independence, I think back to a dinner I had with my mom right after I had to give Pilot away. I was proud of myself for doing a difficult thing, and I wanted to be recognized for it.
“After everything she endured, I finally realized I had to do what was best for—”
“You,” she said, pleased to be able to finish my sentence.
“No,” I said, confused. “For Pilot.”
This exchange nagged at me and I am only now understanding why. Years ago, she was me and I was the dog.
I wish I had realized then that giving Pilot away to guarantee her happiness at the expense of my own represented exactly what a good parent does. A good parent puts their child first, before themselves and all others, and that’s what my instincts had suggested without having to be told. I chose her, and when I saw she needed more than just me, I chose for her, giving her what she needed. I chose her future happiness. I was a good parent at the exact moment I thought I wasn’t.
I think back to another parenting revelation I had nearly two decades ago—which I promptly forgot—when Kara invited me to sleep over with her and May, my six-month-old and first-ever niece. I was besotted by the baby, and while Kara’s role in life had expanded to include that of a mother, her role in my life hadn’t changed in the ways I feared. In the morning, Kara let her snuggle with me and she crawled my body awake. May’s existence offered my narrow frame of feelings another layer I hadn’t felt since Nina was born—hopefulness. It was a tough transition, and while Kara was a natural, being a new mom was hard. She and her new mom friends were overwhelmed and depressed. I wanted to be as good a sister to her as she is to me, but I didn’t know how. I noticed that the babies absorbed the emotions of their caretakers. Their moods altered to mirror their moms’ or nannies’ nerves. I wondered then if that’s what happened to me when I was a baby during my parents’ divorce. Maybe I picked up all the bad energy and stored it like a sponge, but could there be a solid, calm Amanda, free of other people’s troubles, still buried underneath? I learned a lot just by watching May take in the world, surrounded by adults who loved her but who were all struggling on their own terms. I wondered then if emotions were transferred in utero, if my mother’s emotions seeped into me. All the inexplicable feelings I have possessed, it occurred to me, may not even have been mine.
I don’t have a baby, but I do have a dog, and I understand my job even more clearly now.
Back at home, after the park, Busy puts one sweet little paw on my leg, and as my love swells, the dread comes with it: One day, this perfect little beast will be dead. What am I going to do without her? So many people I’ve loved have died or fallen away. Now I’m afraid that all the time I have with this dog will be spent anticipating the day I no longer have her.
Since I was small I’ve had one foot in the future, never fully present with the time and space inside which I’m standing. Growing up, my mom always focused on what I didn’t have or couldn’t do; she was always in the future somehow, too, trying to get me help, trying to fix me. My dad also was focused on the externals: how we looked, acted, and how we did in school. The focus on what I lacked took precedence over what I had, and without realizing it, I adopted that way of thinking—my lack became my focus, too. Without meaning to, I co-opted a precept I didn’t and don’t actually believe.
I want to raise a dog the way I would a child—to be self-reliant without the need for enmeshment. I will be present and attentive. I will nurture even that which I do not understand. I will try to understand. I will put myself second. I will be a good mother and pay attention. When there is no longer any Busy in my life, I will think back without regret, grateful that I was conscious and present with her for every one of her days. So I stop and look into the eyes of this dog I still think is too skinny and too little and I say, “Busy, I am your forever mama and this is your forever home and we are a forever family.” Then she puts her head on my leg and falls asleep.
Maybe Javi was right and there really are two kinds of people: those who worry and those who are grateful. But we’re not beholden to the “kind” of person we’ve been. If I worry all of Busy’s life, I’ll have missed it. If I’m always so afraid of death, I’ll never actually live.
I try hard to stay present and attuned to the moment, but I can’t help it, a few minutes later I lower my head and make sure she’s still breathing.