Dogs are not children, but there are similarities

I used to cringe every time a couple referred to their dogs as "our children." I had small children at the time, and I knew the difference.

When our children grew older and moved out of the house, we got a dog. I didn't have anything against dogs. I grew up with dogs, which were never allowed in the house. Dogs were my playmates on the 26 acres of rural land where my parents had moved to in 1940. I loved our dogs, but they never went inside and probably never had a bath or a flea treatment. Only once can I recall taking a dog to the vet, and that was a stray Chihuahua whose hair was falling out.

My relationship with dogs was not hands-off. I wrestled with dogs, ran with dogs, cuddled with dogs and loved those dogs. But even then, I knew they were not my children — or my parents' children (they already had five bipedal children). 

Nevertheless, the past three nights, without a child in the house, I felt like I was caring for infants again. Each night, I was awakened between midnight and 1 a.m. to the sound of a bark or a scratching on the hardwood floor accompanied by peals of thunder or the roar of heavy rain. Those sounds drove our old rescue dog (of indeterminate age) into panting anxiety as he searched for the source of the noise, sought safety from it or tried to protect us from it — who knows what he was thinking?

What worried me more than his anxiety was his "solution" to the problem — he would urinate on the dining room floor, apparently in the belief that would make the annoyance stop, and someone would have to clean up the pungent puddle.

So for three mornings in a a row, I got up from a comfortable bed, went downstairs (the old dog can no longer climb the stairs), opened the back door so he could urinate in a better place, let him back in and spent an hour or two trying to calm him down so he'd go back to sleep and, hence, I could go back to sleep.

Sometime during those nightly sojourns it occurred to me that I had been through that sort of thing before. It was 40 or more years ago, but the memories are sharp. An infant's cry or a toddler's frightened shriek would arouse us from our own sleep, and we'd spend an hour or so calming down our child and getting him/her back to sleep so that we could sleep too. My wife was usually more attuned to babies' crying sounds, so she was usually the "first responder" in these frequent incidents.

My recent care-giving for our dog reminded me of those long-ago nights. In 40 years, we have graduated from a distraught, crying baby to a distraught, anxious dog. I could pick up our babies and cuddle them, whispering softly to calm them, but all I can do with the dog is pet him and recommend good spots to go to sleep. The last two nights, I have grabbed a book I had been reading, turned on a light and sat on the stairs within reach of the dog's ears and read for as long as it took for him to calm down and close his eyes.

Although my recent experiences have been similar to those sleepless nights many years ago, I'm still not going to call our dog our "child." Like a child, a dog can be expensive, but the child is exponentially more expensive. And, I would add, more rewarding, loving, stimulating, caring, satisfying.

So I'm not my dog's "daddy," as some pet owners would say, but he does get me out of bed in the middle of the night, just as our children did.