But as I get older, I'm thinking it might not be so bad to have a little me running around, so long as it's a girl and doesn't talk back. In lieu of launching directly into motherhood, however, two years ago I decided to get a dog. If I can handle this, I reasoned, then surely a child can't be much worse? I know there are some subtle differences between raising a baby to adulthood and looking after a dog for 8-15 years, and although I have discovered that some parents can get pretty uppity about the distinction between pet and progeny, I still feel that basically the idea is the same. Your life as you know it is over either way; the only difference is that when you go on vacation you can stick your dog in a kennel, but this is generally frowned upon for babies.
Dog ownership, like child rearing, isn't all roses and glory. Yes, Sheba is soft and cute and she gives me that warm, needed feeling when she wakes up to discover I'm home and goes apeshit all over the house, but she also rubs her ass across my floor, doesn't listen to me when I call her (being deaf is no excuse), pisses in the corner, and keeps me up at night with her incessant scratching. That's something I had no idea existed before owning a dog myself: dog allergies. And just my luck, Sheba has them in spades. She's allergic to grass, which is great if you're a dog, because a nice alternative to going out on the grass to pee is just squatting wherever you feel like it and relieving yourself on the carpet. But this is not so great for the human who walks on that carpet, and so to counteract the extreme allergic reaction Sheba has when I take her out 5-6 times a day to pee on our front lawn, I am forced to give her Children's Benadryl daily so that she bites her feet 5% less than she otherwise would. The summer is the worst, and it's an ordinary evening where I'm sitting between Hector, eyes red and nose running and doped up on a powerful Zyrtec/Sudafed combo, and Sheba, feet almost bloodied due to a constant manic biting alternating with frequent scratchings.
This weekend, my Mom was visiting, and since she's allergic to Sheba, I let her sleep with me in my room and promised that Sheba wouldn't be allowed in. Apparently I should have checked with Sheba on that though, because the first night, she spent an entire half hour after we went to bed scratching on the bedroom door demanding to be let in. My mom and I are both light sleepers, so while Hector (who I had asked to please keep Sheba in bed with him in the living room) was able to conveniently ignore her desperate clawings on the door and drift off to sleep, the etchings she was drawing on my door were making it pretty impossible on our end to ignore. I know there are schools of thought that say when babies cry at night, you should ignore them so they learn that crybabies won't be rewarded in THIS house, but obviously I will be in the camp of "tough love is great, but sleep is better". I let her in and she immediately settled in to scratching under the blankets. She was in rare form and woke us up every hour on the hour with a medley of scratching, choking, and getting up to retch in the corner or stare expectantly at the door til I took her outside to use the bathroom. I basically didn't get any sleep all weekend, and if this is what having a baby is going to be like, then no thank you. My mom left this morning, so I'll see if Sheba behaves herself tonight now that she's back to being Queen of the Bed, but even this short-lived sleep deprivation has been enough to make me question my future life choices.
Until you can stow your babies in cages filled with blankets and food and water while you go to work, I'll take dog ownership over baby ownership any day.
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