Why don’t I have any pics of my dog on Facebook? Because I am playing out my relationship with my mother in my relationship to our dog. I know on a primal level, because I would never do it on purpose, but I was kind of ‘trained’ to be this way by my own childhood. It’s one of the many reasons I didn’t want to have another child. I was truly afraid of this carrying out with one of my son’s siblings. No human deserves to be treated that way.
It’s bad enough that my dog has to live through it. He isn’t mistreated or anything, I just don’t make it any secret that I am a cat person. I think he knows that I don’t mean it personally, in his much calmer, and wiser, dog intelligence. I think dogs instinctively know how to react helpfully to traumatized humans (this is why they are so helpful for therapy). I know that I am doing at least one step better because I have actually, on multiple occasions, cried to the dog, apologizing for the unfairness and repeatedly told him that I know he is the best dog, and that I do love him… (yes, I have literally done this).
And yet, my own mother, the woman who gave me life could not do this for me. She would rather never talk to me or my son again. She let her pride be bigger than how much we would need support when he was diagnosed with autism. She turned ⅔ of my family members against us so that it felt like we were losing them all at once at a time when we needed much more than the little support network we had.
My dog is jealous of the cats in the same way I was jealous of my half-siblings. They were so obviously favored, it was sickening. They were so much younger than me, it was more like I was their handmaid than their sister. They were close with each other, but I never became connected in the same way with them. I felt I had to hide so much of myself because my mother made it clear that she believed I was a bad influence, and that she didn’t want me affecting them in a negative way. They didn’t know why I kept getting checked into psych wards. They got the edited, censored version of it. They weren’t allowed to know when I worked at Hooters, when I started stripping. They weren’t allowed to know the real me.
I know what our dog must be feeling when he sees the cats sit on my lap and sleep in my bed because that’s what I felt when my brother went to the doctor for an ear infection while I went six months or more complaining about abdominal pain caused by an infection. He thinks in his doggie inner voice, “Hey, I’m a pet too. Why can’t I sit up there like that?”
I thought, “Hey, I’m her child too. Why can’t I be loved like that?”
This post inspired by Black Balloon by Goo Goo Dolls
Truth Serum 