Dogs Gone Wrong
There have been so many mishaps when it comes to our dogs lately. The cumulative effect of one entanglement after another finally dissolved me into tears yesterday, and with a complete stranger.
Right now, these dogs are my only friends, apart from Jason. They are my constant companions in an otherwise lonely situation. They provide entertainment, comfort through snuggling, comic relief, and a reminder to go outside on a consistent basis. And I’ve come to feel they are like a barometer, measuring the pressure of the situation we are in.
I’m here to tell you: The people here are not dog people.
It’s become painfully obvious that we are not fitting in. And frankly, I’ll take that as a compliment. I am sure that individually, each of them are fine people, just muddling through like the rest of us. But by and large, dog friendly, they are not.
Examples:
The first night we were here, we took an Uber-ride to the grocery store and back. Outside of our room, wrangling groceries and room keys, and gallons of hopefully-less-nasty-tasting water into the hotel room, Mabel ran out into the narrow hallway. Right at the moment that a woman on her phone was walking by.
The woman startled and quickened her pace, yelling, “Get yo’dog on a leash! This some ghetto ass shit! People don’t even have their viscious dog on a leash! Shit!” She would not hear me as I gathered the little dog into my arms, aplogizing profusely. I had to walk back through the lobby, to go outside again for more groceries. I could see the angry woman making a bee-line to the front desk, still with phone to ear, no doubt to file an official complaint against us.
When I walked back through the lobby, the clerk said, “Ma’am (my name here is Ma’am), you have to keep your dogs on leashes at all times.” “Oh, yes, I am so sorry! We will, for sure. It was a mistake that she got out. I apologize!” “That’s ok Ma’am. It’s just the rules.” He was very kind, and I saw that he had his own dog behind the desk with him.
It turns out this woman is here for flight attendant training, and will likely be on the same flights as Jason. She still refuses to accept my apologies, which keep coming. But yesterday we had a breakthrough near the elevator, when I said Hi, and she said Hi back. No eye contact. Phone still on ear. But she acknowledged my existence. Progress.
This morning I peeked out into the hallway to check no one was right outside our room, before letting the dogs out. Mabel sensed someone from the other side of the door, and let out a startled bark. The woman nearby who was walking down the hallway, not even seeing the dog, let out a small shriek, and broke into a full run.
The other day, waiting in the lobby to speak with the front desk clerk, Mabel could tell there was a fearful, dog-hating lady standing nearby, and wouldn’t stop barking. Even though Mabel, in all of her 12 pounds, was held in the safety of my arms, this woman perceived her as such a threat that she quickly backed up around the corner. Only allowing herself to steal a careful glance from a safe distance, she stayed hidden until she could see that we were gone.
This does not help us to keep a low profile.
Back at home, on our three-plus acre property in the woods, if a stranger walked along the adjacent trail, or approached the driveway, standard protocol involved running at top speed toward the affronting intruder, and barking. Their fool heads off. They wouldn’t hurt anyone. Ever. But, by golly, they could sound just as vicious as could be, and provided a foolproof alarm system.
Here, the space between us and the next guy averages about five feet, which makes reaction times about ten times quicker. There is no warning shot across the bow. Only immediate lunging and snarling, and frankly, I’d be a bit scared, too.
It’s so unlike them, really. They’ve never done this before. Unless someone approached our property, apart from the barking to warn them who’s place they had arrived at, they have always been 110% friendly with people. It’s like they smell fear. And I guess they think this hotel is our territory now.
I’ve been adapting. To manage this newly evolving situation, and especially after what happened yesterday, I have made the following adjustments to my habits:
I no longer open our door to let the dogs out without checking first to be sure there’s no one walking right in front of it.
I always use the side door, to avoid walking past the front desk.
Above all, I DO NOT use a retractable leash anymore. Keeping the leashes short and taut, and easy to pull back on, is key.
Have we become those people? Who just can’t see what a menace their dogs actually are? Who think it’s everyone else who is misguided. That no one appreciates them for the sweet, cuddly, friendly beings we know they are?
When in fact, they are a complete nightmare?
This pushes a very sensitive button for me: The Bad Mother button.
What mother among us has not felt the critical eyes of harshly judging onlookers burning through her, during her children’s public displays of inappropriate behavior, over which she had no control?
I raised my children in a painfully small town. Everybody knew what went on in everyone else’s lives. Who’s car was in your driveway overnight. What kind of milk you bought at the store.
Humble pie was on the menu every day.
Being a single parent with two wayward teens, I was constantly outnumbered. One seemed intent on blowing up his life. The other had his head more squarely on his shoulders, but was nonetheless prone to the normal (maybe normal+) experimentation of any kid.
There was no hiding our flaws. Our freak flag flew in neon colors, right from our front porch.
Being in a role that put me in a particularly hot seat, ie: helping to usher families into being as a home birth midwife, it felt especially painful when my less-than-perfect parenting was on display in such a widely broadcasted way.
Alaya smoking cigarette butts out of the ashtray by the hotel. Khephran getting caught with some weed, when his friend’s car got pulled over in the middle of the night, their red eyes betraying them. Alaya stealing something. Alaya being generally delinquent on the regular.
The cop who would call me to come get Khephran that night was one I had served coffee to as a barista. The victim of Alaya’s thievery would end up being the child of one of my housecleaning clients.
No where could you turn that your own defects weren’t staring back at you.
Compounding this small-town syndrome, was the fact that it was a very conservative one. Everyone my children went to school with, almost to a person, came from a church-going family. Most of them were politically 180 degrees from where I was, and those that did share our sensibilities almost always had two, married parents who were ten years my senior, a sizeable income, and seemingly well-mannered children.
Scraping by, hand to mouth, and waking up each day to go off to one of my three jobs, I was constantly outnumbered, two-to-one, by my children. There was no other adult standing by to have my back. No one to say, “Hey! Respect your mother,” or “Don’t speak to your mom that way.”
I never felt that I had any natural authority over my children. Perhaps because I was a kid myself when I had them. Figuring it out (or not) as we went along was the only way we knew. In desperate moments, if I tried to pull an authoritative trip on my kids, it was so out of character that the result was to incite mocking laughter, not compliance.
You don’t know who you’re going to give birth to when you sign up for this job. It’s become clearer and clearer to me over the years: these people who come through you are who they are from the first minute they are born. Nature and nurture are both in there, to be sure, but my experience has shown me that once hormones are on the run, and rebellion in full tilt, Nature is more likely to win.
And so it was with a mantle of shame that I would walk through the streets of our town during those years. Perhaps the most painful kind of shame is the sort that you work overtime trying to hide. Not ever knowing what shoe would drop, my stress was palapble. For years, on an almost daily basis, the forecast called for shoes raining down faster than I could keep up.
One particular night, I was called to a birth just as I was drifting off to sleep. The woman lived in a town about 30 miles from mine. It was winter in Alaska, and we were having unseasonably warm temperatures, owing to the Chinook winds coming over the Knik glacier from the southeast. The Pineapple Express, people called it. The snow had all melted in the course of a couple of days, and at the time I was called, the winds had grown ferocious enough to cause widespread power outages.
I drove the Glenn Highway south, right into sheer darkness. My ancient Subaru climbed the twisting, mountainside road as reliably as ever, but by braille. As I pulled into the driveway, I saw that the lights of the house were out.
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We set about scrounging up every candle and lantern we could find. The father of the baby stoked the wood stove, as his wife moaned from the bedroom. This woman was having her sixth child, and was no stranger to the process. What we didn’t anticipate was how badly she would bleed, or just how long her labor would take.
Through the night, she would have rest periods. Her contractions would let up, and even stall out; her uterus tired from spending every last dime it had just to keep the baby moving down, and eventually out.
When she’d drift into a relieving moment of sleep between her pains, we would quietly straighten the room, put some fresh juice by the bed, and I would glance at my busy phone. I was anticipating another client’s call, as her labor was slowly beginning to rumble.
Praying to whatever unseen forces are in charge of The Order That Babies Are Born In, I was happy the alerts were not from her. But what I did see were some distressed texts from my children. I had neither the time, nor the space, to attend to them.
This is a sad truth about being a single mother: You are almost always going to have to choose between work and your children. And, of course, it’s your children you are working to keep alive.
When I had driven away on this particular night, thinking they were soon headed to bed, I had assumed my teenagers wouldn’t need much out of me.
But the texts kept coming.
“Alaya won’t get out of my room.”
“Khephran is being a jerk to me.”
“When are you coming home? Alaya won’t stop singing and I’m trying to watch a movie.”
“Mom, Khephran locked me out of his room.”
Oh my GOD. These kids! They were being such a pain in the ass. It was two in the morning! Why weren’t they in bed? Here I was in this exhausted state, trying hard to help keep this poor woman’s labor going. We needed to have this baby!
The phone kept lighting up.
“Khephran says he’s calling the cops on me.”
Oh my God, I just wasn’t even going to look anymore.
Finally, the baby was born, and the blood just wouldn’t stop.We stumbled about in candle light, not so uncommon in a birth room, but with no better choice of illumination. The wind had stopped, but still no power. Big, fat, juicy snowflakes had replaced the rain, and were quickly piling up in the early dawn light (of ten o’clock in the morning).
That’s Alaska in a nutshell. In a twenty-four hour period the temperature had risen to thirty six degrees, melted all the snow, a raging windstorm had caused a power outage, and then it switched to full-on rain. Now with plummeting temperatures, many inches of snow were accumulating on the deck railings, barely visible through the darkened bedroom windows.
I could see that the text messages continued to flow in, but had no time to track what was happening. My stress was so internalized at this point, and on such a daily basis, that I couldn’t even see the extent to which it was eroding my health.
When you are in a busy birth room with a difficult labor, or even at a quiet, evenly-progressing one, it’s your number one job as a midwife to leave your problems, and really yourself, at the door.
Already I was in breech of contract, just to have glanced at my phone at all. But there’s little choice when two clients are neck and neck in early labors.
We got the bleeding under control. Injections of Pitocin seemed to do nothing, but with herbs and homeopathy, the arcing blood finally slowed to a normal dribble. Honestly, we had begun to think about calling 9–1–1. But as often happens, just when you start reaching for your phone, the situation turns around.
It took hours to clean up. We did a newborn exam, provided some stitches, and got the mother and baby into and out of their healing, herbal bath. Once we had them then tucked into bed, we gave our instruments a precursory rinse, to be sterilized later, and loaded our equipment back into bags by the front door. Sitting to catch up on our chart notes, I could see that my phone had died, and with still no power to charge it. I fervently prayed, once again, that these babies I was waiting on would politely take turns. I even allowed a selfish footnote, that I might close my eyes a while before being called out again.
The landscape had been transformed from a dark and rainy one, to one softly blanketed; a scene of stillness. Now a foot of nearly untracked snow lay between me and my bed, in muted, December light. To travel the thirty miles home took an hour and a half.
Driving home from a long birth is not unlike driving drunk. Adrenalin, like a high tide receding from the shoreline, pulls back with a sweeping gravity, scouring every cell of its energy.
I arrived home mid-afternoon. The kids had just gotten up, and were full of stories about the previous night.
When Khephran had forcibly removed and locked Alaya out of his room, Alaya, retrieving his Air Soft rifle, had used the blunt end of it to stab a hole right through the cheap, builder’s grade door.
Khephran, red-hot in his renewed anger while relaying these events to me, said that Alaya had been firing air soft rounds at him through the hole in the door. So, he had hidden in the bathroom, and called the cops.
Apparently when the policeman arrived (the same coffee shop customer, again), he asked where their mother was. At 2:00 in the morning. They said they didn’t know. At a birth somewhere.
Though thoroughly humiliating, it was a good thing this officer was as familiar with our family as he was. Which was not much, but enough, I guess, for him to be sure I was not just off somewhere honky tonking. I think he was aware of the multiple hats I wore, and that I did it all alone. I’m honestly not even sure how this was resolved, or why I was not hauled off to jail for failure to mother properly.
The Bad Mother complex has a hair trigger for me. And here, we know no one. I’ve neither served coffee to, cleaned house for, nor caught the babies of any of these strangers. So they can’t know my well-meaning heart. They can’t know that I would never have vicious dogs, or take any harm lightly.
Yesterday, the worst happened.
Walking out of the door of our hotel room, to take the dogs to pee, a moment of perfectly ill-fated, bad timing coalesced. A man, and luckily a VERY nice one, was walking by just as Mabel lunged and barked at him. Juneau got involved, straining on her taut line, and barking frighteningly, even as Mabel’s retractable leash unspooled, allowing her to jump at him. He leapt back, understandably, and grabbed hold of his leg.
I don’t know what happened. It all exploded so quickly. Somehow he had a mark on his leg, and was walking quickly away from us. A maid down the hall had come out of a neighboring room to see what the commotion was all about. I wanted to die. “Are you ok?” I called out. “Wait, are you ok? Did she scratch you?” He turned to wave me off with a pained and nervous smile, as he continued to walk backwards, away from us. The maid glowered at me, and I turned, quickly escaping out through the side door.
My heart was racing. What the fuck just happened? My dogs stood, staring at me with tongues lolling, trying to understand, too. I walked them around the back of the building, my thoughts in rapid fire, my breath keeping pace.
I could never, ever go back inside that hotel. Did Mabel bite that man? Or just scratch him? Or was it Juneau? He had a mark on his leg! This was not ok. My mind raced towards being made to put my dogs down. My only friends! Or being thrown out of my only home here, separated from my husband during this critical time in our lives. I would never be welcome in any hotel ever again, anywhere. I started walking towards a grassy parking strip, forgetting to calm down or take deep breaths. What if our dogs are just mean dogs now? And will never go back to the way they were before?
A door opened, and the man walked out towards us.
“Do your dogs have their rabies shots?” he called. “Yes, oh yes. Oh my God, I am so, so sorry. Yes they have all their shots. I can show you- we had to prove it in order to fly here, so I have all their paperwork. I am so sorry! Are you ok? What happened?” I was going a million miles an hour, in sheer panic.
The mark on his leg was small, but had already turned angry and red. Was the skin torn? Or just bruised? It was hard to tell. We talked for a while, and then I started to cry. He said, “It’s alright.” “No, no. It’s not. It’s not alright at all. This is not how my dogs are. This has never happened before.”
Now he was hugging me. Awkwardly, as the dogs in question were still leashed to me. And we didn’t know eachother. And it’s Covid-times. But his instinct was to hug me. ME. The Bad Mother. With the bad children. Why was he comforting ME?
In the end, we chatted a bit, and I asked if he was here for flight training, too. He is. He’s going to be Jason’s co-worker. Lord, have mercy! The shame. But, Thank All That Is Holy, this was a nice person. Not a litigious one. Not one who wouldn’t rest until my dogs were dead, or in doggy jail. Or we were thrown out, on all six of our ears.
Now this hotel seems as clausterphobic as any small town. I can’t go around a corner without seeing someone, and assuming they know I’m that Bad Mother. The woman with no control over her evil dogs. I wear my sunglasses and wait for quiet moments to slip in and out of the building. I may never go to the front desk again.
