3/10/2011 - not so much about gratitude. . .

I think I may have understated my feelings about Grr the other day when I said that I was a little annoyed at him.  To say that I have been feeling very ambivalent about him would be putting it in the best possible light, but to just go ahead and say that I feel a growing resentment directed toward him would be more accurate.

I don't want to feel this way, especially since he is a really sweet little pup, but I can't seem to help myself.  I could easily explain it as a matter of irritability due to a lack of sleep, but I know that it is more than that.

Actually, I should clarify.  It may have originally been about a lack of sleep, but because it went unaddressed, the problem now has become something of a philosophical issue (as many issues end up when I get my hands on them).  Now, it is not merely about Grr not sleeping through the night, or his accidents in the house, or his inability to go outside because he is scared of the traffic noise.  It has become an issue of character.  My character.

I'm going to say something here that I'm not sure if I really even mean, but I have no other way of expressing the magnitude of how I feel other than to say that I wish Sam and I never adopted this dog in the first place.

Does that make me a bad person?  Even if it does, it shouldn't, right?  Nowhere does it say that I must welcome a dog into my life as some point with open arms.  Yet I know that my inability to cope with Grr's behavioral issues in the midst of night after night of broken sleep somehow makes me selfish or worthy of judgment.  You're probably judging me right now, and that's totally fine because to some degree, I feel like I deserve it.

Eleanor Roosevelt famously said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.  I think it would have been more accurate to add an addendum to the end of that phrase to say, "but they can make you reassess your own character and if you end up feeling inferior, it's not their fault."

My mom wrote me an e-mail the other day after I told her that I was extremely frustrated with Grr and am finding him harder and harder to bear.  She dispensed some advice that was more or less what I had already heard from countless websites I consulted, but she closed her note with the following: "If you have love, then you would be willing to tolerate anything."  The implication there is that if I don't accept Grr for all he is and love him because (as opposed to in spite of), then I don't have the capacity for love.

And maybe I don't, but I don't need her to tell me, and I certainly don't need Grr here for the hands-on demonstration.  And if I don't, then it would be a very disappointing realization that I will eventually have to deal with, because I never thought of myself as the kind of person with a finite amount of love. 

But before I plunge into a deep existential crisis, I know that the past few weeks have been difficult in large part due to my approach to the matter.  I know that if I changed my attitude, shifted my paradigm a little and focused on the future, the one where Grr inevitably becomes the kind of dog I need while I hopefully grow to become the kind of owner Grr wants, this whole issue will then barely even be a blip on the radar.

On the flip side, Sam has been endlessly patient, loving, and caring toward Grr, something that I absolutely did not expect from him.  He walks and talks to him around the garage while trying to make him go pee and/or poop, turning it into a casual stroll (in a tight circle, but a stroll nonetheless).  When Grr pees in the house, he calmly gives him a dirty look, but then says not another word about it as he cleans it up.  He holds him up to the window so they can look out at the passing cars together and get used to the noise.  Meanwhile, I stand there and beg him to go pee and curse quietly to myself when he misses his puppy pads or has an accident.  When he was afraid to go outside, I instinctively turned on my bad parentings skills, like King George to Bertie and his stutter in The King's Speech: "Just get it out, boy!  Get over it!"

That is not who I want to be, nor is it who I want Grr to think I am, but at the same time, I can't get the idea out of my head that just three weeks ago, my life was simple and plain and just the way I wanted it.  To say that I miss that life would be yet another understatement; I long for that life.  And I feel like I am failing to meet the expectations that this should be a happy occassion, one full of love and fun and discovery.  This further fuels my frustration, though I guess I do accomplish that last one, since the last few days weeks have been all about discovery, though not exactly in the way that I had wanted or expected.

So today is really not so much about gratitude as it is about personal introspection, a fessing up of how I have been trying to spin Grr's presence in my life into something positive when I really am running out of ways to feel good.  I'm hoping if I admit that so far, the pet-owning experience has not been all about fun and cuteness, I can maybe move beyond what I think is expected of me and how I should be feeling and actually try to feel something genuine, something altogether better than how I've been feeling so far.