You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness by Julie Klam Page A

on the calendar that would be good for him to leave. It reminded me of when my friend Mae had a baby girl. Her son often asked if they could send her back to the sky.
    “Mom, Moses isn’t going to live here anymore, he’s moving away,” Violet would announce. “We don’t want him here anymore.”
    “Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work with me, kid,” I told her. But I tried to make things better. Moses wanted to be the closest one to me. In the evening, Paul and I would read books to Violet before she went to sleep. We would lie on our bed with Violet in the middle of us, but now Moses would jump up and get between her and me. And she’d be shoving him and pushing him and grunting at him to move. He would suction himself to the bed and stare straight ahead as if he were deaf. She grew more frustrated, and he remained stubborn. I wasn’t happy that Violet was having difficulty, but I did think that the simulated sibling conflict might not be a bad thing in the end.
    Our schedules had gotten busier. Paul’s workday was longer now and I was doing all of the household, child, and dog chores. I started to feel like walking the dogs punctuated every moment of my life. It sort of reminded me of breast-feeding, in that I was either doing it or heading toward doing it or just finishing doing it. So we hired a dog walker to do one of the shifts. In the evenings, she came in and sat on the floor leashing up the dogs and talking to them in her funny dog voice. “What is this lady doing to me?” she squeaked, as though she were one of them. “I was just fine sitting here minding my own business. I don’t want to put my leg through there! Oh, lady!”
    For the sheer fact that she wasn’t me or Paul, Moses didn’t want to go with her. It was always a struggle. She came in one night upset and said Moses had wiggled out of his harness, but she’d been able to grab him before he went into traffic. I’d never had that problem with him before but we tightened up the harness so it wouldn’t happen again.
    It was a very chaotic time in our home. I was getting ready for a book publication that involved a tour of eight cities in eleven days. I would also be leaving Violet for the first time in her life, and I’d never even taken an overnight trip away from her. My mother would come to stay with her and Paul and then he’d come out and meet me on the West Coast. We talked about it a lot. I would call all the time, I’d always have my phone with me, and she could have whatever she wanted while I was away. When Paul came to meet me, my mother would take Violet and the dogs up to her house in Vermont, which was near my last tour stop so I’d come and pick her up there. It was so stressful. Not my first book or this development in my life, but abandoning my child. My therapist suggested that this was a good thing for Violet, that she’d probably thrive and would feel very good about herself afterward. It was all being planned and then my dad said no to bringing the dogs up. We’d come there briefly with Moses and Bea at Christmas, and Moses had started fights with my parents’ dogs. He just had no good social experience. Bea had taken on being the alpha at home, but elsewhere, to Moses, it was still up for grabs. I understood my father’s feelings, that they were going to have to deal with little Violet and maybe that was enough. So I decided on the dog walker coming to our apartment to dog-sit. In a distant second place to my concerns for Violet was my fretting for Moses. How would he take our leaving? Would he think we were gone forever? Would he bond more with the dog walker or totally freak out? Clearly, if there’s a more anxious person than me, they are probably sitting in a hospital somewhere. When I finish worrying about one thing, I can go to the list and take my pick of the next.
    At the three-week countdown I started physically preparing: ramping up my gym schedule, shopping for new clothes, making hair appointments,