Six Kids and Six Pets

No pets. It was a simple rule that I enforced strictly for the first ten years of my marriage. I knew my capacity and knew that pets were beyond it. Were they cute? Yes. Were they too much work? Also, yes.

Then one day, a friend posted a picture on Instagram of a wrinkly little puppy in a flower pot. We’d just bought a new house with a big yard. I was pregnant with my fifth child and had questionable judgment. It was a perfect storm. I sent the picture to my husband, expecting that he’d say the puppy was cute and then we’d both move on with our lives.

What I didn’t know was that my husband had been quietly waiting to spring a puppy proposal on the family. I’d given him an opening. He messaged me back. “Let’s get him.” Now, at that point I still thought there was an out. Surely no animal rescue would, in good conscience, think that our chaotic household was the best place for a new puppy.

Much to my surprise, the dog rescue drove down to our house for a home visit and quickly certified us Very Competent Pet Owners. We were getting a puppy.

Six months later, I had both a newborn baby and a new understanding of what it meant to own a Plott Hound. He liked to dig, a lot. Outside, he dug holes all around our back yard. Inside, he tore apart every “indestructible” dog bed that we purchased. One day, needing him quickly contained, I tossed him into our home office. When I came back fifteen minutes later, I discovered the puppy had dug a hole in the carpet the size of a dinner plate straight down to the concrete. After much crying, we decided to use the disaster as an excuse to replace all the flooring on the main level of our house. We would, by necessity, do the work ourselves.

Photograph by Karen Images / Adobe Stock.

A few weeks later, as I stood there jackhammering the tile out of my foyer while my children ran amok and unsupervised upstairs, I couldn’t help thinking how much easier my life would be if I didn’t have to clean up the messes of so many creatures. Why did I do this to myself?

Then, the job was done and I sat happily in my newly carpet-free living room. And here I could tie things up with a neat bow and declare that I had learned to appreciate beauty arising from chaos. Except that wouldn’t exactly be the truth. Don’t get me wrong: I did appreciate the new (indestructible) wood-look tiles. I appreciated the satisfaction of a job well done. I enjoyed the Audible book we’d listened to during the entire process (Seveneaves, by Neal Stephenson. Duration: thirty-two hours). But deep down? I was still pretty bitter that my hand had been forced. I was pretty mad at that creature.

I had made the series of decisions that had ultimately led to this conclusion, but still I felt some sense of injustice about the whole thing. A puppy is assumed to be destructive, sure, but not this destructive. In retrospect, what I had agreed to was the puppy in the Instagram post, the platonic ideal of a puppy, and not the incarnate reality of this particular animal. Now, faced with who he actually was and what caring for him actually required, I balked.

My platonic puppy would pose serenely with my well-behaved, Christmas-pajama’d children. Meanwhile, my actual puppy existed only as a blur for the first three years of his life and the best picture I could get of the children (six of them now) inevitably includes one actively trying to escape the frame. There was always a disconnect between the life I imagined and how things actually played out.

Real life, it turns out, does not follow a neat script. Realizing this, there are two paths available to us. We can either turn in on ourselves and reject the messiness of living an interconnected life or we can try to build something beautiful in spite of the roadblocks and missteps that are inherent to particularity, and a life filled with creatures.

Despite how frequently reality rudely intruded, I held on to the tendency to romanticize my life. Pinterest boards and dog-eared magazines abounded. Each year’s potential garden was a hypothetical masterpiece. Then reality would hit as crabgrass invaded the garden before my carefully chosen seedlings took root. Despair threatened to overtake me, and all the good intentions mocked from the corner. It would be easier, they whispered, if you never even tried. Leave the perfect garden at the Pinterest-board stage. A seedling is another creature with its own imperfect selfhood. It might not behave as you envision it.

But try again I did. Sometimes that resulted in failure after failure and disappointment after disappointment, but sometimes it resulted in something close to what I had imagined. Perseverance in the face of reality, I’ve learned, might just be the key to creating lasting beauty. In order to fully live, you have to let go of the dangerous allure of a blank notebook or a model home. At some point, you have to take action in the material world and abandon the safety of imagined perfection.

Creating an imperfect beauty in a world full of creatures requires more of us than is immediately obvious. It requires bravery. It is easier to stop. It is tempting to never even start. I’ve learned over the course of the last twenty years raising children and building a home that it is more often than not a matter of simply beginning, and then continuing on. Life is almost all the messy middle.

Or beginning again. That might be the hardest of all scenarios. My successful pregnancies were all interspersed with miscarriages. It’s difficult to explain the fear that gripped me after each loss. Would trying again simply mean bringing more pain into our lives? Maybe. Sometimes. I had an early miscarriage just before conceiving our youngest child, and that very nearly convinced me to give up. There is no actual way to mitigate the pain of loss.

The only way to prevent heartbreak is to prevent the chance for joy. So, reluctantly, I chose pain and joy. Cautiously, and with great pessimism, I stepped out into the abyss. There were no Pinterest boards with my most recent pregnancy. There was just fear and a faint hope that this great risk would be worthwhile. It was.

But: they all are. All worthwhile. Not just the pregnancies that give me live children. Not just the times that things turn out as one hopes.

There is no perfect end state here. No final safe outcome. You will decorate your living room and then, God willing, watch your grandchildren destroy it to build their forts. You will write your masterpiece and see it misunderstood or ignored. Your sweet, perfect newborn will grow up to feel betrayed by a decision that you made, and you’ll have to sit with the knowledge that you might have set a boundary in the wrong place. Or you might not have: it might have been the right place but nevertheless have caused pain.

And sometimes, this might feel like too much. Why bother creating beauty when entropy will always fight against your best efforts? Why bother with any of it? A life where we never strive can at least seldom disappoint.

But it can also never astound. My puppy was not the puppy I had imagined, but the dog he became has been a steadfast and devoted companion for our family. Was it worth it? Without question. I paint the walls and the children leave handprints on them. I scrub the walls. No one notices. There are more handprints the next day!

Every action that I take is building a life for those entrusted to my care. Every framed picture, every mopped floor, every folded shirt matters. It won’t, it can’t be perfect. It will be painful. But it will be beautiful, eventually. That is what beauty is: it is the life that is lived.

So paint the portrait or the porch. Try again after the miscarriage; love the children whose hands you wash and the children whose hands you never got to. Get the puppy. Live. Live. Live.