When you die, you want to come back as my dog
I am a perfectionist by nature, which also means do it right or don’t bother doing it. Half-way is half-assed. Once I set my mind on something, I make it happen. I embraced my nature and decided that my motto would be “making OCD work for me.” And it did. My husband and I planned our wedding in another country with military precision. For over a decade, I was a successful teacher in some tough neighborhoods, a corporate manager, a survivor of working for Chicago Public Schools’ central office and I even lived to tell the tale of working for one of the most wack bitches in Chicago’s PR world. Known professionally as “the girl who makes the trains run on time” a former colleague nicknamed me ” The General.”
So you would expect that I’d be a super parent, one of those moms that the other moms at the playground talked about behind my back. Once I was married, I carried around the picket-fence plus family mental image in my mind. Except it wasn’t us with 2.5 kids in the ‘burbs. It was me, John and A DOG, not in the ‘burbs. The hurdle to achieving my dream and unleashing my skills was simple. We didn’t have a dog. For a long time, John flat-out refused to discuss it, always maintaining that we weren’t ready. We were, or at least I thought we were ready according to myriad questionnaires I found on the internet. It crushed me that my call to dog-mom-dom was left unanswered and that a dog in a shelter somewhere in Chicago was missing out on the good life.
Of course we got a dog, otherwise this blog would be a single-subject monologue about being an unfulfilled Dog Mom wanna-be. Once we adopted our pup, all the pent up frustrations resulted in my becoming an over-earnest, over-eager dog mom who made an ass of herself from time to time. Along the way, my well-intentioned endeavors brought me many wonderful things, including the smug self-satisfaction of looking at other dog moms and saying to myself, Yes, I am doing it better that you and my dog has a better life than yours. HA.
People regularly say to me that when they die, they want to come back as my dog. Of course they do…now. I didn’t start out as a damn good Dog Mom, but I got there. As a matter of fact, I was completely clueless. So, to the people who say that parenting is an art, I call bullshit. It’s time, dedication, information and persistence among other things that separate the so-so from the spectacular. You will become the Dog Mom you want to be if you want it bad enough. And I did.
Once upon a time…