“This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”
I’m one of those women that forgot to have children.
My friends that did remember to have children talk about how their offspring have turned them into people that closely resemble their own parents. They are aghast when they catch themselves repeating familiar parental adages that echo back to their youth. The very phrases and actions they swore they’d never, ever espouse to their own brood.
My friends point out the similarities of raising children with my experience of raising four-legged “kids” of the canine persuasion. Those similarities include my propensity for barking orders and dispensing insane logic. Like a human parent, I am highly skilled at identifying culpability and I may possibly become the expedia.com for guilt trips. Even knowing full well that heaping on guilt, lecturing and verbal analysis do not work with dogs (and probably most children) I’m compelled to persist.
My dogs are big. My dogs are hairy. My dogs are male. My dogs sometimes make me crazy. In the midst of chaos and times when I lack the capacity for rational thought, there are certain phrases that have become the tag lines of my life.
“This is why we can’t have nice things!” is the axiom I most often express during bouts of indoor canine horseplay. It is usually followed by “You’re going to fool around and fool around ‘til somebody gets hurt!” There are the ever-popular tirades of “I don’t care who started it!” and “It’s all fun and games until somebody pokes an eye out!”
When a session of Living Room Agility breaks out, I threaten, “Don’t make me come in there!” And for vehicular roughhousing the word is, “Don’t make me stop this car!”
I seem to be afflicted by canine chaos induced memory loss. In attempt to single out the troublemaker, I blurt out something to the effect of, “Mo-Ju-Bob” or running through the list of their names before arriving at the right one. By then, the moment has passed.
I believe that my dogs would tell me that boys just want to have fun, but all too often, I’d respond with, “Don’t give me that look!” or some paraphrase of the Bill Cosby line about how I brought them into this house, and I can take them out.
I’m accomplished at stating the obvious, with lines like “You guys live like animals” and “Were you born in a barn?” Since my dogs are each of undisclosed backgrounds, the latter question might truthfully be answered with a yes.
My Mr. MoJo is a talker. He could appear on Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks to perform his best stunt, responding to the question, “Where do you live?” He answers, “Aaa-roar-ruh” (We live in the city of Aurora). But MoJo often takes the talking thing a bit too far. Fearful that he’s one meal away from starvation, he yells at me when his dinner is 30 seconds late. I scold, “Don’t use that tone with your mother!”
Then there’s Bob. He’s a little more laid back about his food, often leaving a portion of his meal uneaten. Now, in a household with two other contenders for food, you’d think he’d be more concerned about cleaning his plate. Nevertheless, I have to tell him, “Eat your food. Don’t you know that there are starving dogs in third world countries?”
I am resigned to the fact that I no longer have any furniture to myself and that perpetual “snoot marks” exist on my car windows. But, every night I say goodnight and thank my dogs for being who they are, in all their lovable brilliance.