What I learned from neglecting my dog…

[This is an old post — possibly from 2013? — I decided to publish…Sharp eyes will note that the dog above is not the dog mentioned below…]

There’s a whole uninteresting post on the ways in which life threatens to overwhelm me. There’s nothing heroic in any of it. Piles of domestic disarray, looming deadlines and my penchant for procrastination, even just the glut of choices I’m privileged to have access to.

Lately, my life has been defined by finding my way on my own after losing my partner of 7 years (no, she didn’t die she just up and left, so don’t feel too bad for me).

Most things get sorted out, somethings for the better (why yes, I will let the dogs on the couch to eat bon-bons!) and somethings for the worse (for fear of getting too emo, let’s not dwell here).

My bigger dog is a bit special. Not short bus special, but definitely a bit peculiar. She likes rocks. Or at least I think she does. When given the chance, she’ll spend a lot of energy chasing them around and barking at them. (No idea what she’s saying, but I’m guessing it’s something like: “ROCK! ROCK! ROCK!”)

For some reason, she hates feet. More than once, she’s gotten a glimpse of my foot too close to her, and she yelps and looks at me balefully. I try and explain that the walkies she loves are made much easier by the existence of my feet, but that just makes her sigh and glare at me more.

This perturbing behavior includes her feet—not that she’s surprised by them, thankfully she seems to understand that they’re part of her and a good thing. But tending to anything on her feet (nails, nicks/cuts, etc.) has always been a little tense at best, and a full-on scream-fest at worst. (She’s got a flair for the dramatic.)

As you can imagine, this makes trimming her nails fairly contentious. It used to involve at least a couple hours, drugs, and one person distracting her by massaging and cooing continuously (imagine peeled grapes and a full doggy spa treatment).

Now that I’m a single (dog-) mom, I don’t have the time for that, and as supportive as my friends are (really, they’re amazing), it isn’t really a normal request to ask of someone. (Not that my life or requests are always normal, but I’ll save that for another post.)

And with all the other emotional and physical buffetting, I completely forgot/refused to deal with my dog’s nails. By the time I looked, the dewclaws on her back paws were overgrown, and one was starting to become pretty seriously ingrown.

Oy, bad (dog-) mom! Bad!

There’s something that happens when enough shit subsumes me…my give-a-shitter breaks. Which is finally what’s been happening. There’s just so much stress milling about in my brain that I finally couldn’t keep up.

And therein lies the magic.

Somehow, I decided to just start dremeling my 70-pound rottweiler’s nails. Without drugs (it was a spontaneous decision, and I didn’t want to wait the hour for the drugs to kick in), without anyone else to restrain the dog, without really any plan.

And it worked! Well. Mostly.

For whatever reason, the big dog let me dremel despite what must’ve been significant pain/discomfort. She grumbled and flinched, which made me grumble and flinch. The dremel ran out of batteries again and again (which made me grumble and order a corded one). But eventually, I managed to whittle them down to manageable-ish lengths. She’s not going to win any dog-hand-model contests, but at least she’s no longer suffering from self-impaling.

So what did I learn?

Don’t do drugs.

If you need to do something, break your give-a-shitter first.

If you’re going to be a horrible mom. Get a dog. At least they can’t write a book about it. And you can blog about it for the free therapy.