The OTHER "Talk"

We kind of had the "other" talk last night. It's something I've been thinking about a lot.

Polly has been here now for more than ten months. There have been no nibbles on her for months. She is so settled here. She is so happy here. Jeri says "you know you're going to adopt her, Mom."

We didn't plan to have the talk. The dogs were playing around the dinner table and we were laughing at how cute they all were and it just came out. The thought had occurred to Walt and me at the same time.

And no, we are not going to adopt Polly. Both of us love her, sort of, but neither of us wants to adopt her.

Every time she is behaving so beautifully and I'm thinking wistfully that it would be such a good thing for her and so much easier for everybody else if we just adopted her, she does those things that drive me crazy--mostly the barking--and it reminds me of why I don't want to adopt her.

I know that if I'm gone a long time and there is a message n the answering machine it will be from the cranky neighbor who always calls about her barking. Even if there weren't any other reasons, her barking alone would be the deal breaker.

But there are other reasons why I don't want to live the rest of her life with her. She's terribly bossy. The dogs get treats when we come home. It's the thing that keeps them all from running out when the door is opened. The second we pull into the driveway she begins her complaining bark her 'feed me NOW' bark and leaps at me all the while I'm walking to the kitchen, growling and snapping at the other dogs until they all get their treat. I think about dealing with that for the rest of her life and I know I don't want to adopt her.

She's still not completely housebroken, though she goes outside more than she used to. I kid myself that when we get the Pergo in the living room it will be better, because she doesn't pee on the Pergo in the rest of the house. But maybe it won't.

She is OK with the other dogs, and occasionally plays with them, but mostly she wants to be a one person dog in a house with no other dogs. She is bonded to me and she doesn't want to share me with anybody, though she grudgingly does. Very grudgingly.

She must be with me all. the. time. Only when I'm working in my office will she be away from me because she'd rather sleep in the recliner than on the floor at my feet (Shiloh and Buttercup would rather be on the floor at my feet). Sometimes I just like to sit down and be alone, you know? If I try to read a book in the recliner, she continually licks my hand because I'm supposed to be petting her, she thinks.

And then there is her brand new trick--jumping onto the kitchen table, a trick she learned from Shiloh, I think. In 10 months she's never done this before, but I found her the other day in mid-leap from table to the floor, looking very guilty (not unlike when Walt found the kids mid-leap from the bunk beds to the double bed when we were staying at the house at Lake Tahoe!). This morning she took a bottle of the Flagyl that Cindy had given me yesterday and I found the container open (it was closed and on the table). The lids are kid-proof, but not dog proof. Fortunately, after a momentary panic, while I shooed all the puppies away, no pills were missing, but I hate to think what might have happened if I had been out of the house.

She can stay here as a foster for as long as necessary, but I have to believe that there is some special someone out there who needs a dog like Polly as badly as Polly needs a person like me.

I remember the dog Slingshot that we fostered briefly our first year of doing this. He was an older lab mix and nobody wanted to adopt an older big dog, He was in his second foster home for months. But eventually an old guy came looking for an old dog that could go walking with him and a marriage was made in heaven.

I hang on to the belief that that "perfect" person for Polly is out there and that if we can just keep her long enough, s/he will show up one day.

But no, we are not going to adopt her.

(We may end up fostering her until she dies, of course!)