You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (17 page)

I set the whole thing up in Violet’s room, since it was out of the way of most of our household traffic. It was about fifty feet from the old bed to the new one, and I walked them like I was going down the aisle. Using my untrained eye, I deduced that the slightly bigger one that was all black was a female, and the smaller, black-and-white one was a male. Though I wouldn’t have put money on it. The next day Sheryl came to visit and brought me an X-pen, a metal gate to go around the whole whelping box to give extra safety and room for Dahlia to leave, along with a piece of faux sheepskin. She said when they got a little older it would be better for them to be on that because when they wet it, it would be absorbed. We set up the area and piled newspapers inside the pen for Dahlia. She absolutely refused to leave them the first two days. Sheryl double-checked my work and confirmed my exam. She also said that their noses were very long—not flat like Bostons’—and their ears were huge.

“Well,” I said, slightly defensively, “I’m assuming the puppies will grow and their ears will look normal.”

She looked over her glasses at me and said emphatically, “They will never, ever grow into those ears.”

Along with another member of the rescue, Sheryl was a breeder. She and Victoria shared ownership of a handful of beautiful dogs, which they occasionally bred and frequently showed (and won!). I was so grateful for her expertise; it reminded me very much of Violet’s first appointment with the pediatrician. You just want someone who knows something to say, “Yes, you’ve done well. It’s all right.”

When she picked up the puppies, I was reminded of when we took eleven-day-old Violet to visit our Lamaze teacher, and we thought she was “throwing” Violet too much. We handled our baby like a handblown glass starfish. While Sheryl checked the puppies’ mouths for cleft palate and did a cursory check of their bodies, Dahlia was up at attention, her nose close to them. When Sheryl put them back in with her, Dahlia picked them up and put them behind her and turned her back to us. She gave us one sidelong glance as if to say, “You are done here.”

Sheryl also checked Dahlia’s teats. She was a little troubled by the lack of milk. Usually when you touched a nursing bitch, milk squirted out. She really had to squeeze to see Dahlia’s milk.

“You’re going to have to watch that,” she said. “If it doesn’t come in better, you may have to supplement.”

Suddenly I was a mother with a newborn again—two of them, covered in fur. I had read online that for the first six weeks the mother would take care of everything, and only after that would you need to jump in. Now that Sheryl had explained things, it didn’t seem like that was the case. The other thing she mentioned was that, really, the puppies were quite vulnerable and while they looked well, if something happened they could easily pass away.

“When are they considered ‘out of the woods’?” I asked.

“Four to six weeks,” she said, “though I’ve known people to lose puppies at nine weeks.” She wasn’t trying to worry me. She just wanted me to realize this wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot. I would need a small scale to weigh them daily, and if they weren’t gaining weight or, worse, were losing it, I’d have to supplement them with puppy formula.

Weighing them was the only time I touched them at first. Their eyes were still closed and they were so dependent on their mother that it was rattling to take them from her, for me and for the puppies. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t just sit in the pan on the scale and wait. Looking more like hamsters than puppies, they tried to get their little bodies out of there. I had considerable difficulty getting an accurate number, but I did my best and I then dutifully recorded what I saw in a composition notebook.

I didn’t want Dahlia to fret, so I tended to do the weighing as quickly as I could. She was the very picture of a natural mother, and she was so incredibly protective of her pups that I wondered if her earlier litters had been taken from her too quickly. Where had her older children gone?

I lay on the floor with my face at the whelping box and watched her nurse, lick, and nuzzle the pups. I decided at that moment that Dahlia would never leave us. As long as it was in my power, she’d never be afraid or wonder where her home was again, and I told her so. I found myself loving her so much, I could barely stand it. She was like a refugee. Dumped in that shelter, examined, caged, picked up, brought to my house. No one had known what she knew, that she was pregnant.

I cooked for her three times a day: chicken or cheeseburgers mixed with puppy food, and cottage cheese and yogurt for snacks. She needed as much as anything to be nourished, which we would have been doing before she gave birth had we known what was about to happen. I brought her meals to her bed, and she leaned her head over and gobbled them up. Some other people in my house wondered if I’d ever cook for them again. “Of course,” I said, “just as soon as you have your puppies.”

But I worried. As hard as she tried, she was still the equivalent of a seventy-two-year-old woman. Her milk wasn’t coming in that fully yet and it might never. Just as I did when Violet was a newborn, I worried that the babies were being starved and that they might die from it. I spoke to Sheryl several times a day, and by day three, I was full-on flipping out. It seemed as though they’d lost weight. We were dealing in minuscule amounts with fidgety puppies, but I felt pretty sure their weight had gone down and I panicked. And I worried about dehydration. Sheryl had said there was a test you could do by pulling the puppies’ fur. If they were hydrated it would go back, but if they were dehydrated it would stay. I did this and stared at the fur. I couldn’t tell for sure, but my sense was that they were seconds from death. It was late on a Friday, and I called Sheryl on my cell as I walked to the pet store. She told me to get the puppy formula Esbilac, eyedroppers, and tiny doll bottles. I picked them up at a large chain pet store, and while the cashier was looking for the prices, I stepped over to the ID machine and made an engraved tag—a red heart that said “Dahlia Klam-Leo” with our phone number.

I brought home the supplies and started sterilizing and heating the milk—just as I’d done with Violet, testing it on my forearm to make sure it was not too hot, not too cold. The formula smelled and looked like baby formula, so it was flashback hell. I tried the bottles first with no luck. The puppies couldn’t suck yet, so I went to the eyedropper. I also burped them in between feedings. They coughed, since they were not really experts in swallowing yet. Sometimes they’d just let the milk sit in their teeny mousy mouths. Paul came home from work and found me feeding them with my face all pinched in worry.

“I am definitely,
definitely
not having another kid!” I said.

We took turns supplementing them, and I got up to feed them once every night. They were still nursing, and they always fell asleep after eating so most of the time it seemed like they were getting enough from Dahlia, but sometimes I just had the feeling that they were still hungry. The next day I noticed they’d stayed the same weight, and I called Sheryl to see what to do next. She e-mailed her breeder friends to ask if any of them had experience with a senior nursing bitch. (I have never gotten used to that use of the word “bitch.”) No one did. It seemed no one anywhere had. I Googled every combination of words—“Senior Bitch,” “Nursing,” “Giving Birth,” “Senior Mother,” “Old dog babies”—to try to find someone who’d dealt with this issue before and was totally unsuccessful. Then Sheryl had a thought. The breeder I got Beatrice from had been Otto’s veterinarian and then retired. He was well-known in the Boston terrier world. She called him for me and found that he’d actually left retirement and gone back to work, but he was an observant Jew and it was Yom Kippur, so he was unavailable. He did give her instructions for me, though, which were to feed the pups 50 milliliters
every two hours
. Every two hours. Day and night. I started to get weepy. I was already exhausted from this and the idea of waking myself up every two hours during the night was pushing me over the edge. Here I had decided not to have another baby, and yet I was being called upon to be a night nurse! I loved these puppies and I did not want them to die, especially for Dahlia’s sake, but I also knew that if I had to spend the next several weeks doing round-the-clock puppy feedings, I wasn’t going to make it. I tried not to get ahead of myself. I just set out to do the one night, and I did. Like I had with my own baby, I ended up staying awake the whole night. It was so similar to that experience, the dim lights in the baby’s room, the small, hushed movements, scanning out the city windows for a trace of someone being awake. . . . It was lovely until the point when I started thinking about getting Violet to school in the morning and then going to a meeting. How on earth would I do it? Was there a puppy nurse I could hire to do nights?

The next day I said flat out to Sheryl that I wasn’t going to be able to manage this myself. We had to figure something out. She decided to call one of the big breeders she knew to see if they had a litter and if we could put our puppies in with them. The problem was, they were seven hours away, but even worse, it would mean we’d have to separate them from Dahlia. When Violet was born, she went right into neonatal intensive care while I was in recovery, and the experience of not being able to see her for almost twenty hours was a much greater hell than the eighteen-hour labor. She in her bassinet and me in my hospital bed both hooked up to machines and wires that made it impossible to move. I didn’t think I could willingly do that to Dahlia.

The vet said we could bring her in with the puppies and he would see how everyone was doing. I took a small Fresh Direct box and, except for the door, replicated the whelping box, complete with one of their baby blankets. I placed the puppies inside, and then I put Dahlia’s halter and leash on. She was going nuts, jumping up to the box. She weighed twenty-five pounds before she was nursing, so there was no way I was going to carry her and the puppies. When we got in the elevator, I put the box down to adjust my jacket and Dahlia hopped in with them. In fact, I was going to carry her and the puppies. Her butt didn’t fit in the box but she was happily nuzzling her pups. I was so filled with empathy for her. I would’ve jumped in the box with Violet, too.

When we got to the vet, he checked them for dehydration. They were fine, and I saw that the fur wasn’t supposed to “snap back” like a slingshot as I had pictured. He also said that Dahlia had
some
milk, and he felt that given her improved diet with lots of calcium, it would come in even more, especially if the puppies continued to nurse. I was told to bring her back in three days and he would check her again. At that point, he would consider giving her something to boost her milk production, but only if it was needed. Every choice was more difficult to make because of her age. It was very different from treating a young mother dog. Now that it seemed like there was some end in sight, I agreed to keep up the night feedings. In a few days her milk did come in (
hurray!
) and I was able to stop.

I related to Dahlia so much during this time it was freaky. She would sometimes leave the whelping box and come into the living room and get in her former bed. It was like you could hear her saying, “I need a break! When is it going to be time for me?” She’d sit out there for fifteen minutes, her paw covering her eyes with her imaginary cup of General Foods International Coffee, a bathtub filled with Calgon, and then go back for more. Whenever she left the puppies for a break or a walk, she’d wrap them up in the blanket, partly for warmth and partly to keep them out of the sight of any predators.

There was something so extraordinary about seeing true animal instincts up close. In your average household dog, you may see squirrel chasing or some deep sniffing of a dead rodent or the psychotic burying of a bone that reminds you, “Oh right, this is an animal.” But Dahlia’s mothering seemed so far advanced from that, or maybe it was just that I’d never seen it. Beatrice, who before the birth was totally dominant over Dahlia, would walk great wide circles to avoid going anywhere near the puppies. Even her instincts were heightened.

When I talked to another group member about the milk issue, she told me the story of how a spayed female poodle had been able to create milk and nurse kittens! I looked at Beatrice, who was comfortably resting on the bed. If she’d been a person she would have been looking at her nails and yawning. “I don’t think Bea’s going to be lactating anytime soon.”

At that point, we started to discuss the future. Paul wanted to keep the male. He was so outnumbered by females in our household, and I agreed. The idea of keeping a puppy was kind of exciting. We told Violet she could name them both, but made it clear we were only going to keep the male.

We talked while walking home from the playground and stopped at a cart for a rainbow ice.

“I don’t want the boy!” she wailed. “I want the girl!”

I shrugged and repeated her teacher Ms. Davis’s saying, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.”

Somehow it worked.

“And,” I added, “you can name them both. They’re both going to be with us for two months, so she’ll need a name as well.”

“What are some names?” she asked me. And I started going through all of our rejected baby names: “Francesca, Gianni, Ellis ...”

She was thinking, her mouth rimmed with glistening red and blue. “I want them to have flower names, like Dahlia.”

I rattled off the common flower names and the more unusual ones. At the time, Violet was heavily into the My Little Pony franchise and her favorite girly horse was named Wisteria. I reminded her of that and she jumped on it. “Yes! Wisteria.”

If we’d been keeping the girl, I never would’ve suggested it. No one was going to want to yell,
Wisteria!
It was a big, odd mouthful. Four syllables on this little tiny puppy!

She then moved on to the boy. “What are boy flower names?” she asked. I couldn’t think of any—though I thought Briar might work; it was masculine and prickly.