Instead of a diary, I told my dog the things I told no one else, believing that she alone knew me. I told her who I loved, what I was scared of, things about me I hated, things I hoped for. I recounted the injustices, slights, and micro-cruelties I had suffered. Or at least believed I’d suffered. The difference between belief and truth – the side of the story the listener favors – seems the determining factor of whether we feel known.
I’d come to expect the latter from the people in my house, who, with the exception of my older brother, did love me. They just didn’t get me. They didn’t believe my beliefs, didn’t think I was feeling what I was feeling, didn’t think reality warranted my responses. They provided for me, educated me, clothed me, opened their doors to my friends for sleepovers and family car trips, acknowledged all birthdays and holidays, gave me gifts, books, dress-up clothes for dances, dance lessons, piano lessons, summer camp adventures.
In the 5th grade, in the middle of 4th period dissection of cow eyes and hearts, the band leader came to entice students to join the band. He demonstrated the wind and strings instruments – for the girls – the brass and percussion instruments – for the boys. Cathy C. and I looked right at each other and made our pact. My parents who loved but didn’t understand me paid for coronet rental for the first semester, then went on to buy me my own coronet. Never once did they imagine I didn’t like playing it, couldn’t master the technique of the cold, hard mouthpiece, that I was afraid I’d ruin my lips and end up unkissable by the boys (a joke my Uncle told me thinking I’d see through it, but I didn’t), that I was waging a gender boundary war and would have happily left my brass arms on the field as soon as someone ended the damn battle.
I told my pain to the dog. We’d walk long afternoons in the field across from our house. I’d make up elaborate tales in which my dog and I were the lone people in a new land, lone survivors after a disaster. I was Joy Adamson and she was my Elsa. In winter months, I’d pretend we were lost in the mountainous caves of snow banks; a couple of times I forgot I was pretending and the cold and fear took over. I cried into my dog’s snowy neck, overcome with a baseless terror that no one would ever find us.
I wonder if my Mother ever confided in the dog. She certainly didn’t have me around to share her world with, and marriage in the late 1950’s didn’t require emotional sharing. In my parents’ generation, people didn’t think about nurturing or tending marriages, just about being in them and doing what you were supposed to do. Marriage was a set of complementary roles and obligations. My parents didn’t benefit from consciousness raising or the feminist rewriting of rigid gender roles. My mother has never examined her V with a hand-held mirror; my Father has never allowed himself to know his own feelings.
Perhaps my Mother and I shared separate intimacies with the dog. Even if I’d been around, I was not the right audience for my Mom, nor was she the right listener for me. I didn’t make sense to her, and all the love she held for me never seemed to matter in the moments where I just wanted someone to understand me. She offered right action, exactly what women of her generation were told to offer. Feminism came in between us, and I demanded to be understood.
Even today, we find it hard to share our inner worlds. I am exasperated with her, can feel my eyes rolling to the back of my head at the mere thought of talking to her on the phone. She is way more diplomatic than I am and tries her best to be cheerful, always cheerful, always finding the positive, reminding me how strong and capable I am, how much I have to be grateful for, while simultaneously noting every possible way in which things have gone wrong for her or my Dad. All I really want is an, “Oh Honey, I know that hurts. I’m here for you.”
My dog never negated my feelings, my truths, my experiences. In her presence I was free simply to have them. She never once told me that things would be OK or that I didn’t really need to see things like that and why was I making so much out of things and didn’t I think I could find something positive in all this and stop feeling sorry for myself? Every doleful brown-eyed gaze told me she knew. She just knew. I’m right here, she offered with her wet nose and pink tongue and tail thump.
I’m not so out of touch with reality to think my dog actually understood me. She knew only about six words, after all. And you could fool her by saying something really awful but in the enthusiastic, “Do you wanna go outside and play?” voice, and she’d ignite with excitement. So how is it I allowed her to love me without faulting her for not understanding me?
I’m changing my understanding of understanding. My words, the contents of my head, my exact feelings – hell, I barely comprehend them. Maybe we don’t need to be understood and comprehended, studied, learned, or analyzed into a logical sequence, flow chart or decision-tree. Maybe we just need to be noticed, held, nuzzled, assumed to be the person another is oh-so-happy to see. The wag-tail enthusiasm for our very being, regardless of whatever we are thinking or feeling in any given moment – the reminder that someone is here, simply here – this, I know now, is how I feel loved.
The other day, I told my husband something about a very old but particularly painful moment. Told him, not the dog. Told him because I hoped I could be known not just loved. “I’m right here,” he read off the cue card. My tail thumped. He put the card down and repeated it again. “Honey, I’m right here.” I have no idea if he understood me, but I believe he did.