Have Boundaries, But Relish Everything

On how we can all benefit by learning to be a little bit more like my dog.

Sitka—variably known also as Sitkapants, the Dog of Doom, My Favourite Fluffy Pup, The Very Best Dog, You Little Bitch, and You Motherfucker, depending on the time of day—came into my life in May of 2017. I had wanted a dog for years and had never felt ready for one, in part because of finances but also in part because I didn’t know what I would name my dog when I had one, and understanding her name was a key part of the whole process.

In the winter of 2016 I moved into a new house, which was also part of the process. For the first time in my adult life I was living in a house that conceivably could host a dog, and not in a tiny too-small attic apartment that was great for anguish and torrid affairs but bad for insulation and keeping a husky mix. My attic apartment, as much as I loved it, was very cold in winter and insufferably hot in the summertime and thus absolutely no place for a dog.

When I did the walkthrough of my new house with my landlord before I moved in, I noticed that the previous owner had left dog bowls in the kitchen, and I spontaneously blurted out, “Could I have a dog?”

She laughed. “Of course!” And that was that.

A few short weeks after this, soon after I moved into the house, I found myself reading about Sitka spruces and feld the name descend on me like a download from the Universe. (In hindsight, that’s probably what it was.)

Sitka, I thought. That’s the perfect name. And a space opened up for her before she’d even entered the world.

A few months after that, I saw her photo on Kijiji. And that was that, as they say.

Sitka, as her wee baby self. The picture that made me fall in love with her. May 2017.

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I brought Sitka home at the end of May 2017. We had just finished our second annual festival over at the FOLD, and I had recovered enough from the inevitable hurricane that is hosting a literary festival to think about adding a new kind of chaos to my life. I felt 100% ready. Puppies were hard, I knew, but also they were easy! Puppies needed a 2-hour nap for every 20 minutes of play! This meant—I did the math, conveniently forgetting that I was very bad at math—that I just needed to play with her or take her out for walks for a total of 2 hours every day to ensure that she would sleep for twelve hours. Eight hours at night, four hours of naps scattered throughout the day in snatches. Totally manageable. Totally doable.

But…Amanda, you’re thinking, there are twenty-four hours in a day.

Well, yes. There are. See: me, very bad at math.

In any case, my sister and my nieces and I drove to Oshawa in May of 2017 and brought the puppy home. My sister took this picture of us right when we got back. It’s still one of only a few photos I have of the two of us.

Of note: the nice tidy pots of dirt that sit behind me, for reasons that will soon become clear. Also of note: I am smiling because I have just stepped in Big Shit and am still blissfully unaware of it.

Thus did my life as a Dog Mom commence. I had read all kinds of things about how it was important to set boundaries with your dog and how you should never ever let them sleep on your bed, and so for the first few days I put Sitka down in her crate in the kitchen and set up an air mattress beside her crate. The first night she slept in the house, I sang “You Are My Sunshine” to her, over and over, as she rustled and whined in her crate. Eventually we both fell asleep. We both slept through the night.

I stayed down there in the kitchen with her for the better part of the next week, and then I moved back upstairs. Not once did she wake me up whining in the middle of the night.

Amazing, I thought. This is going really well.

I was still in Big Shit, as it turns out, and still blissfully unaware of it. But sometimes that’s how the best things happen.

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Puppy life was good, but tiring. As it turned out—shocker!—either my math was bad, or the statistic I’d read about puppies and naps was bad, or maybe it was all moot because I’d decided in my infinite wisdom to get a husky-shepherd mix. In any case, Sitka slept through the night but did not sleep…at all…during the day. We leash trained early and went on lots of walks. People would stop and cross the street to squeal over how cute she was.

And look. They were not wrong.

Also of note here, aside from the very cute dog, is all of that lovely red gravel in the upper left-hand corner, which she eventually destroyed.

But she was a puppy, and I couldn’t take her to the dog park until she got all of her shots, and so for a few harried months we…struggled with balancing energy.

For a while she also struggled with balancing her ears to the rest of her body.

She liked to get into things. As all puppies do.

“She’s sleeping through the night!” I wailed to my sister. “I walk her for two hours a day!”

My sister shrugged. “She’s a puppy!” she said. “Having a puppy is worse than having a newborn!”

Look at how cute she is, though.

She couldn’t manage the stairs in my old house just yet, and so I moved my office downstairs to the dining room. One day I glanced up from working on the book that would eventually become The Centaur’s Wife to hear her…chewing…despite the fact that I hadn’t given her anything to chew.

She was chewing one of my (very expensive) orthotics, which she’d very enterprisingly discovered and pulled out of my shoe. When I called the orthotics office to schedule a fitting for a replacement, the receptionist laughed and laughed.

Thus began Sitka’s Chew Phase. Here are some of the things that she chewed over the next few years:

Her first dog crate:

One of the couch cushions.

This very good book by Elizabeth Renzetti, henceforth renamed CHEWED:

More couch cushions:

A second dog crate, despite this one being “extra strong and tough”. The manufacturer’s words, clearly. Definitely not mine:

Then she decided to branch out and reconfigure the couch:

When it got warmer, she decided to attack the patio furniture:

She also ate this water bottle:

And this garment bag:

And lots of other things besides.

And because you’re no doubt—as I would be—looking at all of this and saying but why would you leave all of these things out in the open when you have a husky mix???? Let me assure you: I wasn’t. I didn’t. She found things. She went looking.

“She’s very smart,” I would say to people. Proudly, but also despairing.

My favourite part about all of it, though, was the day in 2017 when I got home from work and discovered that she’d managed to get out of her crate for the first time and I walked into my house and found this: