The puppy, the broken leg and the bone-deep love
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Puppies get in your face, literally. Mine licks my nose, cheeks, ears and even my mouth, breathing hot little puffs against my lips. It’s impossible to object to his small, exuberant mouth. He clambers over my body as if am a series of foothills to be conquered and then nuzzles into an improvised nest in the crook of my arm or on my lap He is, in the most physical and insistent sense, present.
I warned you to expect puppy anecdotes. I’ll admit, I imagined writing something more light-hearted than this. But love sometime stamps with a heavy foot, whether it arrives on two legs or four.
We’ve had our puppy for just a couple of weeks. We got him partly because I wanted to fill the quiet space left by our children as they continue their slow but inevitable migration from our little nest into the open skies of their adult lives. I thought he would be a welcome distraction, a new kind of joy. And he is. But in bringing him home, I’ve unexpectedly reopened doors I didn’t know I had closed, to memories, to questions and to slumbering emotions.
Eleven days after he arrived, he did the very thing we’d been told he mustn’t do. Startled by a noise, he leapt from the sofa and broke his leg. It happened in an instant, as most regrettable accidents do. It happened on my watch.
Cue a late-night emergency vet visit with the kind of eye-watering bill that makes your chest tighten, a referral to an orthopaedic vet surgeon and a detailed plan for strict crate rest and a cautious, phased rehabilitation.
I expected a puppy to fill my empty nest but not so closely resemble the experience of my chicks when they were stretching their wings and learning to fly. And this has brought back many memories. As I wait today for the call from the vet to let me know his bones are now knitted together with metal plates, I find my mind wandering — as it so often does these days — back to my sons’ earlier years.
My boys broke bones too, which was inevitable when their pursuits were boxing, bicycles and goalkeeping. I wonder now if I did enough.
There was the time I knew — knew — that a cast shouldn’t come off. I was over-ruled by an orthopaedic consultant who thought he knew more than a mother’s instinct. The arm broke again the very next day, in exactly the same place. I was right, although what a hollow vindication that was.
Other times I was simply oblivious. I sent one son off on a Duke of Edinburgh expedition with what we thought was a ‘sore wrist’. When I collected him, pasty-faced and silent, the paracetamol box completely depleted, I realised it was more serious. Sure enough, a fracture for him and a pang of guilt for me for sending him on an overnight orienteering expedition with a huge rucksack.
Now, as I prepare to nurse this tiny creature through weeks of recovery, I find myself reflecting on those long-ago injuries. As I ponder the two months of puppy rehabilitation ahead, I wonder if I did enough for my sons to nurture them in these periods, especially the one who had breaks, surgeries, corrective surgeries and casts for most of two years. Was I present enough? It’s hard to be sure, especially with guilt-tinted maternal spectacles.
We’re so often in a hurry — with puppies or with children — to reach the milestones: house-training, independent sleep, school readiness, exam success. We convince ourselves it’s for their benefit, but there’s comfort for us, too, in the illusion of progress and in the pursuit of order. In truth, they’re small for such a short time — what’s the rush?