>{Note: This edition of I Bearly Remember is less about Bear, and more about the animals that lived in our home when we brought her home from the hospital. If this isn’t the sort of story that interests you, please skip it.}
“[Bear] was two weeks old and finally, finally, coming home.“
The night that we brought Bear home from the hospital was hurried and rushed. The hospital staff didn’t release her to us until dinnertime, and because we hadn’t planned on fixing a meal that evening we stopped by the McDonald’s drive-through on our way home. I was so preoccupied with bringing Bear inside from the near-freezing temperatures on that Bavarian November night, I nearly forgot about introducing her to our fur-babies, Maggie and Snickers. Fortunately, Tony had remembered this not-so-insignificant detail, and ran inside ahead of me to grab hold of the beast that we had previously considered to be our baby.
Tony and I were a month away from making the international move from the US to Germany when we acquired Maggie. I was still living in my dorm room at college and he was in between residences; he had been dropped from the Army Ranger School when he broke his foot during the seventeen-mile ruck march in the first week, but had no other schools to attend, nowhere else to live. His orders didn’t allow him to leave for Germany until the end of May, and so he bunked up with a friend from his Infantry Officers Basic Course. Tony had grown up with dogs, just as I had, but for him having a dog was like watching TV before going to bed. It’s what he did. So in the hours that he spent in limbo, waiting for me to finish my degree so that we could finally live together, he found a nearby breeder. She had Maggie, the last remaining puppy from the litter, who was five months old when Tony flashed his own puppy dog eyes at me, whimpering, “Can I get her? Pleeeeease?” We got her.
There was a reason this dog was still without a home so long after her siblings had found theirs. If you’ve ever read the book or seen the movie Marley and Me, this is what Maggie came to be when she was full-grown: a 65 lb., jumping up and down into the air as though she had springs attached to the bottoms of her paws, slobbering, disobedient mess of a black Labrador retriever. She was a lab from the hunting genes side of the pool, and no amount of exercise that we gave her could slow her down.
She left piles of destruction in her wake. Our first Christmas in Germany, Tony and I had painstakingly chosen thoughtful German gifts to give to our families back home. We found a traditional smoker for Tony’s mom, who collected them, and had excitedly put it aside to give her when she made the trip to see us at Christmas. It sat for several months in one of the basement rooms, protected until we could give it to her. Until Maggie found its box, ripped it apart and left the wooden splinters for us to find. We had no choice but to give those splinters to his mom with an apology and a sheepish smile: This is what you would have had if it hadn’t been for Maggie…
That was not her only destructive act: she ate a brand new Palm Pilot that I’d gotten for myself; a pair of my glasses; boxes of spaghetti from the pantry that she opened herself. She consumed an entire pound of German chocolate-covered coffee beans and then regurgitated it back onto the rug, so as not to poison herself. Most days I returned home from work to discover the contents of our garbage and recycling bins strewn from the kitchen into the living room, down the stairs to the laundry room and up into the bedrooms. Tony and I even discovered one day that she’d gotten into a box of matches while we were gone; somehow, in a way that we will never understand, she’d managed to light one, the proof of which was burned as a hole on the rug in our dining room. We eventually put up baby gates to contain her to the living room when we weren’t home, though she learned to jump over those, too.
Tony and I jokingly called her a raptor because she reminded us of the intelligent clawed beasts from the ever-popular movie Jurassic Park. From the day we moved into the beautiful house we called our first home, Maggie tested the fence around our yard. Repeatedly. Not a day went by in those first months that she didn’t escape under some new gap in the fence, to gallivant around our next-door neighbors’ yards, or into the manure-filled corn fields across the street, or to end up on the receiving end of a bloody ear from the dogs who protected their farm down the road. She escaped one Sunday morning when we were about to leave for church, wandering into a yard across the street and somehow ripping the skin off her left front leg. We found the number for an on-call emergency veterinarian, who patched her up for us at a moment’s notice, and who spayed her a few weeks later. After that most invasive of procedures, Maggie jumped off the table after waking from the anesthetic, hopping up and down as usual. “Maggie,” the vet admonished, “You were supposed to calm down after being spayed. Not get more hyper.”
Maggie could open doors in our house because the handles were of the pull-down-to-open kind, rather than the grip-and-twist variety. We had to lock ourselves – and her – into the house because she learned quickly to open not just the thinner door that lead from our foyer to the mini-mudroom, but also the heavy storm door that lead outside. One night in the middle of my pregnancy with Bear, I dreamed that she had let herself out of the house, had wandered into the neighbor’s yard, and found herself locked out. So she sat in the neighbor’s yard, looked at our bedroom window, and howled up to us. I woke from the dream in a sweat, but discovered her on the bed beside me and went back to sleep. Two hours later, I awoke to the sound of Maggie barking at me from outside our bedroom window. She had let herself out both sets of doors, found herself locked out, and was barking at us to let her in from the neighbor’s yard.
To say that we were fearful about introducing our fragile, just-out-of-the-NICU newborn to this tornado was an understatement. But she was wonderful with Bear. Just wonderful. Some dogs must have this innate sense about them, an intuition that allows them to switch off the crazy behavior when around the young, the old, or the infirm. Maggie was such a dog; from the moment we held Bear at her level, something switched inside of her. She was calm, collected, and mature, as though some maternal gene that we never knew she possessed was summoned up from the depths of her doggie soul in order to co-habitate with a human baby. Maybe she truly understood that Bear was too young to play the way she normally would. Maybe it was a sense of self-preservation: she realized that one false move would mean her life with us as she knew it would be over. Whatever it was, I never again had a moment’s pause about allowing our fur baby to be around our biological baby.
~~~~~
Snickers was the result of Tony’s inexperience as a new husband. Five weeks after arriving in Germany, we were still living in a small hotel room while we waited for our house to finally be released to us so that we could move in. My birthday fell three days before our move-in date, and although we weren’t yet settled into our house Tony was already busy at work. He left before I awoke that day, coming home only at lunch to bring me McDonald’s chicken nuggets. I made spaghetti for my own dinner that night; there was no cake, and no gift from my still-new husband on this, the first birthday we spent together as a married couple. Snickers was his peace offering to me, coming to join us in our home a few weeks after we moved in.Tony had never been around cats; he knew nothing of introducing a six-week-old kitten to what appeared to be an “I eat kittens for breakfast” puppy. Fortunately I had experience with such introductions from my many cat-ownership experiences throughout my childhood, and despite watching Tony throw his hands in the air as the little ball of fur that resembled a cat hissed and swiped at his beloved Maggie, the animals grew to love each other. Tony even grew to love Snickers, as she made it clear that she definitely preferred him over me, positioning herself on his chest as he slept at night so that she could lick his chin as he slept.
Snickers was no extraordinary cat. She didn’t do tricks or amuse us with her antics; she could never live up to the reputation of her canine-sister. She was a cat through and through; very much of the mindset that she would permit herself to be petted only when she was in the mood. If she wanted to be held, she would come to us, but under no circumstances would she be happy with having her attention sought out. She wasn’t a big cat; at her full-grown size she still weighed just six pounds, but she held her own against Maggie. We often walked into rooms to see Snickers sitting on a table or chair, crouched on her hind legs as she batted Maggie’s face – claws sheathed – in a mock boxing match. She put up with Maggie’s attention when the much larger dog would pin her down with her her forelegs, then place her jaws around Snickers’ head, coming up for air and leaving the cat with soggy fur to meticulously put back into place for hours afterward.
I wasn’t worried about Snickers when bringing Bear home, not when we had Maggie to contend with. Snickers had been attentive during my pregnancy; she used my ever-expanding belly as a comfortable place to rest at night, throwing me disgusted looks when I tossed and turned and she found herself repeatedly needing to situate herself comfortably as I disturbed her sleep. When we brought Bear home, she showed no signs of jealously or fear, but rather feigned interest in the first few minutes, and later determined that Bear was okay as long as she still had a place on my lap.
~~~~~
You can probably gather that Maggie and Snickers are no longer a part of our lives. After two and a half years of struggling with Maggie, we came to the difficult decision that we were not the right owners for her. We could not keep up with her energy levels and her exercise needs, as was evidenced by her destructive behavior. We weren’t enough for her. Two months before we moved back to the US, we asked the woman who we’d left her boarded with during several vacations if she could find a better home for Maggie, and she did. Friends of ours who left Germany a year after us told us they’d inquired after her when leaving their own cat for a long weekend stay, and had been told that Maggie was happy with her new owners, who brought her on five mile runs each morning and with them to the flower shop they owned during the day.
Snickers did PCS with us back to the states. She easily survived the ten-hour flight from Munich to the east coast, traveling with us as we were displaced for five weeks while Tony attended airborne school and Bear and I bounced around from his parents’ house in Virginia, to my parents in Connecticut where Snickers was declawed, then back to Virginia and on down to our new home in South Carolina. Five months later she made the exhausting trip from South Carolina to Virgina, then up to Connecticut, and from there on a three-and-a-half day journey to our new home in Colorado.
Snickers survived the introduction of not just one but two new dogs into our family; she tolerated the ever-more-interested Bear’s affections, and stayed out of the way of the young baby I began sitting for part-time shortly after I conceived Bug. She made it seven months into my pregnancy before she decided she’d had enough. She stopped using her litterbox, instead eliminating her waste just outside the litterbox and using Tony’s shoes as a urinal. We brought her into the vet where we paid hundreds of dollars for tests that determined she was not sick, but rather that she was having difficulty adjusting to the changes in our home.
She escaped one day during a visit from my parents and we didn’t find her until three days later, when I caught a glimpse of her crouching beneath our neighbor’s car. Two weeks after that she developed a festering wound on her cheek, which exploded during the night. When we woke the next day we found blood spatters all over our bathroom walls and floor, on the walls and carpet leading downstairs, on all our furniture. Another trip to the vet showed that she had been bitten by another cat during her stay outside, the results of which had been growing worse for weeks until it finally burst. We got her wound patched up, we convinced her to begin using her litterbox again, and we thought she would be okay. But when Bug was born, she acted out again, peeing all over the carseat we’d brought him home in and which had carried his scent.
It was the final straw. I couldn’t handle it anymore. If the circumstances had been different, maybe I could have put more effort into making Snickers more comfortable in her home. We’d had her for over five years at this point, after all. She was a member of the family. But I was an exhausted mother of two now; I had an almost-four year old daughter who was adjusting to having a sibling, a newborn who literally nursed around the clock, and a marriage that was barely hanging on. Plus two dogs that I couldn’t stand the sight of. A Prozac-needing cat was the lowest on my priority list.
So we found her another home. I was *this close* to bringing her to the Humane Society, dropping her off with her favorite toys and her kennel, and wishing her good luck, but a friend of ours informed us that a colleague was looking for a cat just like Snickers to help fill the void that the death of another cat had left in her life. I told the woman to bring Snickers back if it didn’t work out; I’d warned her of the trouble we’d been having with her, and been honest about why we were giving her up. Part of me hoped that Snickers would come back to us, but I never heard from the woman again.
I can only hope that Maggie and Snickers are happier in their new homes than they were with us. As frustrating as they both were, we still miss them in our own ways. Besides, we have more critters to contend with these days.
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