(Your Neglected Animals)
If you’ve always been a pet owner, you know that pets can be considered members of your family. You’ve probably loved your pets more than you have some relatives or maybe even some siblings. When I was a young girl, I would dress mine up in some Barbie-style outfit and sometimes even put diapers on them and pretend they were my babies. Fortunately, I grew out of the Barbie-dressing-up phase but pretending they were my babies I never outgrew.
I’ve craved having a real baby ever since I was twenty. Still, I knew deep down inside that I had places to go, losers to sleep with, and ladders to climb, so having a baby just to have a baby wasn’t in the cards for young Jenny. I changed direction and decided to get a dog. My first was a bulldog named JoJo, after my sister. I used to bring her to work with me on MTV, and she made many TV appearances on Singled Out (sometimes dressed up in Barbie clothes and tutus). Anyway, she was my bitch and I was hers. Unfortunately, after only two years she passed. It killed me. My baby had gone to doggy heaven.
So I scraped myself off the floor and searched for a new baby. I found another bulldog that I named Bubba, and for my girly pleasures, I got two shih tzus named Baby and Puppy. These dogs were the light of my life. I groomed them and gave them a doggy door in the wall of my house so they could have access to their grassy kingdom whenever they wanted. There were framed pictures of them around the house, and I even entered my bulldog in competitions. I WAS A DOGGY DORK, BUT I DIDN’T CARE! I would rock the shih tzus to sleep and curl them up on my pillow. I told myself I would spoil them until the end of time and nothing would ever get in the way of that.
But when I brought my real baby home from the hospital, I locked them outside for three months and basically ignored them. It was amazing to me, after all these years of spoiling the hell out of my pets and making them a priority—even over my husband at times—that I had so easily emotionally abandoned them. I didn’t mean to, but it just happened. Evan was so new and perfect that I didn’t want to take the chance of the dogs becoming jealous, so I waited and waited and waited to introduce them to my baby.
When I finally did make the introduction, the shih tzus were great with my son, but the bulldog was a jealous mess. He would try to push the baby out of the way with his massive head, but Mommy wasn’t gonna let that fly. I was so freakin’ torn over what to do because Bubba the bulldog was my beefy man sidekick. Whenever I got cheated on by a boyfriend or had a series cancelled, Bubba’s wide shoulders were the ones I wanted to cry on. Fortunately, my sister offered to take him and she lived down the street, so we decided on shared custody. Bubba stayed with her and I got to see him whenever I wanted.
The two shih tzus let my son grab their tails and even crush them when he rolls over them. But I gotta tell ya, they don’t get 75 percent of the attention they used to, and it breaks my heart. Sometimes I’ll be getting ready for bed and say, “Oh, shit, I forgot to feed the dogs.” Even the pink bows in their hair have been replaced with leaves or whatever brush they get into outside. My once-pampered princesses are now treated like regular dogs.
So, when it comes to your own flesh-and-blood offspring, you’re not going to let your furry friends be the boss of you. Your furry friends will take the backseat or, I should say, the back porch of your attention the moment you bring your baby home. Just let them know that you love them and that you’ll be back—you just need some time to adjust. You’ll know if you’re neglecting them too much if they start to resemble Lara Flynn Boyle’s figure. Just give them a big bowl of food and tons of kisses, and tell them that Mommy is still here for them.