When I grew up, most all of the neighbour’s children had
brothers and sisters except me. When sun was setting down behind the buildings,
and darker shades of pastels colored the skies above the grass and sand
playground, my pals retreated to their homes to interact with siblings, while I
would talk to plastic dolls and feel lonely.
My repeated requests to my parents to produce more children
for my own companionship and entertainment were met with inflexible refusal. My
arguments were rational: “Mom, my children will be deprived of aunts and
uncles, not like me, who has so many of them thanks to you having siblings!”
and if you would have heard me when I was a little school girl pleading for my
cause, I promise you, you would have run to the bedroom with your partner to
fulfill my request! However, Mom was better at debates than I was, and
suggested I go marry a man who has brothers and sister, to solve my future
children’s predicament.
That’s when I changed my strategy, and re-negotiated for
siblings, or a dog.
So dog it was.
My first dog-sister was Lily, a small multi-colored mutt
with black and grey, and a snow-white tip of the tail. Lily had a bright
disposition, and loved chasing neighbourhood kids in circles, barking joyfully,
joined by their screams of delight. I was as happy as she was with this whole
playground arrangement, the chasing, the barking and the screams, but our
happiness was cut short: we had a car accident when Mom was driving, and she
decided that Lily brought her bad luck, and gave her away.
So here I am, back to square one, no brothers, no sisters,
no dog.
One night, while my father was out of town with work, mom
was sitting on the sofa, and I was reading Jack London’s stories at the kitchen
table. White Fang, Call of the Wild, stories of snow and dogsleds and wolves
and friendships like no other, images were dancing in front of my mind’s eye,
my imagination replacing the author with my own self touching the dogs, talking
to them, racing the sleds to victory. When the story I was reading ended, tears
flowed down my cheeks with longing for such a special connection with a furry
friend.
“Why are you crying?” asked Mom, with a concerned face.
“I want a dog!” I exclaimed between tears.
“This is it? I thought it was something serious!” Mom, usually
attuned to me, missed my feelings and motives this time. But then the phone
rang. It was Dad.
“Dad! I want a dog!” I yelled into the receiver, and cried
some more.
There must be something about being a father away from your
family, hearing your child crying on the phone.
And then, there came Cici.
Cici was a brown Dachsund, a shy cuddly sausage dog who
slept with me, starting at the feet at the beginning of the night, then ending
up on my pillow, nose to nose with me. She was always cold and wore a coat in
the winter, and at night she crawled under the covers and against my body for
warmth.
I was in my early teens when Cici joined my family, and I
loved her to bits. She was an easy dog to be with, and funny to play with. She
chased and battled with garlic heads, chewed on raw carrots and corn on a cob,
and ate polenta. One day I worried she had tooth abscess, half her face swollen
suddenly. It was a piece of polenta that stuck between her teeth and her cheek,
and she couldn’t move it on her own. When she was sick, I carried her in my
arms, through trams and busses, to take her to the vet, until she was well.
When she got in trouble, chasing birds only to land in a dirty rain water pool,
I wrapped her in my arms, ran home with her, and bathed her.
I treated Cici like my parents treated me: with love and
care, and also with the clumsiness and cruelty of traumatized, unskilled
parents: I beat her when I disagreed with her behaviour, like my father did
with me. That was the norm in my family, and I lived up to it.
My father was the responsible person for Cici’s care –
buying and preparing her food, making sure she had her walks, taking care of
all dog care practicalities. “I feed her, walk her, take care of her, and she
goes to you all the time!” Dad would exclaim with clear jealousy. “And what do
you do for her? Play with her, that’s all that you do!” Cici preferred me, came
to me when everyone would call her at the same time, and trusted me. She did
not protest the veterinarian’s injections if I held her, she’d hide her face
and long nose beneath my bent elbow, and be at peace.
When Mom died of leukemia, I was seventeen, and shut down
emotionally. Mom had suffered with mental illness for a few years, she
disconnected emotionally from the world, from herself and from me, and after a
few years of intense suffering, she faded away and passed on January 23 1978,
one day after my seventeenth birthday. I did not shed a tear, and thinking that
was something utterly wrong about losing your mother and not cry, I tried: I
spent hours alone in my room thinking of something sad, so I could cry, and all
my efforts were in vain.
Dad had a nervous breakdown, and went away for two months at
a sanatorium in the Carpathian mountains, where he swallowed pills and took leisurely
walks through the woods. And I did what I found fit with this unprecedented
freedom: went to bed in my day clothes, smoking with the ash tray close to the
pillow; hosted parties for my high school class mates, and hung out with them
for hours after school. I would leave home early morning and come back late at
night. Cici was left alone at home, with me and Dad away for all the daylight
hours, and little by little she became depressed: she stopped greeting me at
the door, shoe in her mouth, crying of delight, like she used to do. She
stopped eating, and spent her days and nights curled in a pretzel, without a
sound.
“Have pity on her!” my father pleaded with me, “Let’s give
Cici away to someone who can care for her. Don’t you see she suffers?”
I didn’t see she suffered. I paid no attention, and had no
empathy. I wanted her for myself, for my own pleasure, a cute toy I didn’t want
to part with. My father’s daily pleas fell on deaf ears for a while, until one
day when I gave up and agreed. Cici went to live with one of the secretaries in
my father’s office, a woman who lived in a home with a garden with hens and a
cat. I felt some sadness, a hint of emotion glimmering through the thick, dense
clouds of repressed emotion, and went on to live my life.
I went to visit Cici once, and found her thin, having shed
the extra fat of her little body, running around chasing mice in the garden,
losing the mice to the cat, living the outdoors life, a different life, without
pillow cuddles, with less food, and more movement and interaction with other
animals. Cici was happy to see me, and happy to jump in my lap. I left her
behind with a heavy heart, the sadness of thinking that she maybe was less
happy in her new home, not being allowed in bed, the guilt of abandoning her
like my mother had abandoned me, my suffering muffled through walls of
ignorance, not really knowing whether it was Cici who suffered or myself,
taking that muffled, dulled out pain with me on the bus as I left my old friend
behind to her new life, and headed to my own.
I don’t know to tell you how many years I have spent feeling
unloved and unlovable before discovering that I also was unloving. How many
times I prayed and hoped that one day I’d be loved and understood, before I
realized the need to learn to understand and love. I had an underlying longing
to connect in ways most adults in my life did not know how, and I had no role
model to learn from, with one exception, a private English teacher who
listened, asked questions, and cared: Cornelia Popescu, a childless children
lover, and dog lover, who always had a black Dachshund girl around.
I had boyfriends and sex, and still didn’t know how to
emotionally connect with another, but the longing burned me from the inside.
When I broke up with my college sweetheart, I longed to be seen, sought and
loved like only a dog can when you are oblivious, and won my arguments to a dog
versus my father and his second wife, Eliza, whom we were now living with.
And along came Mushi.
Mushi was a black male Cocker Spaniel with all his
pure-breed traits and papers, a two-months old adorable puppy with ears so long
that we’d clip them up with clothes pins when he ate and drank, otherwise he
would get food and water on his ears and shake it all on us. I don’t know how
much I owed it to Mushi, and how much to Eliza, my warm, wise and loving new
stepmother, that my heart softened up and I started feeling emotions again. And
I fell deeply and irrevocably in love with Mushi.
-To be continued -
No comments:
Post a Comment