Today's Funk: When Practical Is A Punishment

Struggling post divorce is typical. Loss, disappointment, trying to be capable, strong and wise in front of your children... And financial devastation.

Each and every one made worse when the whole mess is a result of domestic violence.

The result: Some days, I just don't feel up to being, well, me.

I would just bury my face in my dog's fur and cry (his coat absorbed many tears of mine over the years), let his sweet gaze fill me with comfort and hope, but I had to put my beloved dog to sleep a year ago.

I miss him desperately.

I have tried to cope with the loss of him. I have coped with hope. The hope that this year was the year I might get a puppy for Christmas, but, well, practicality is often a punishment, if not it's own hell.

There's still a girl dog here; but she doesn't give a hoot for me. Despite my having raised her from a pup nearly a year before moving in with the current (and last!) husband, this dog is his dog, not mine. She brings me no comfort. She only demands things from me -- actually stops snuggling or playing with my husband to come get me to take her out to go potty!

She is not my dog.

I miss my dog.

You know, I have a certificate for a companion therapy animal. It's supposed to prevent a loss of housing and whatnot for having a pet; protection for the discrimination against the anxiety ridden and/or depressed. But the certificate does not provide a dog or money for a dog. (It's never just the cost of the dog, but the ongoing costs.) Nor does it make the dog I have become a therapy animal or even my companion. Stupid dog can't read. And probably wouldn't care even if she could.

I had no illusions about really finding a puppy under the imaginary Christmas tree. I know the balance in the old bank account. I just hoped that somehow one would find it's way there, my very own Christmas miracle. But there wasn't -- either a Christmas miracle or a puppy.

I was OK. Resigned enough not to pout, anyway. But then today...

Papers were delivered regarding court action on an old medical bill. Horror! Shame! I swallowed them under the usual calm-headed practicality of a survivor who knows that you just have to keep struggling, comforting myself with the fact that this bill, while more than we have now, is something we can accomplish. Eventually. (If only the car would stop needing repairs, if only those other "bumps" in the road of life wouldn't set us back each month, threatening to return me to my post-traumatic induced agoraphobic-dressed bed. The thing, induced by violence, that led to the companion animal certificate.)

And then, not 10 minutes later, the phone rang. "Hello! We have Basset Hound puppies -- and there's a male available for you!"

I then did the worst thing possible: I went to look at pictures of the pups online.

How can something so cute knock you to your knees? Make you want to vomit? Make you cry with all the self-pity of a self-absorbed teenage girl? Force you to humble yourself with a "Dear Diary" entry online -- or risk balling all the way into the family dinner time, alarming all?


I blame no one else. I should have said, "No, thank you, not this time," and got off the phone.

I should not even have asked, "How much?" (In some perverted twist of irony, the exact same price as the medical bill -- and both available/due within similar time frame, give or take a week, as puppies, not claims, are flexible with their dates.)

I should not have gone to look at them.

I broke my own heart.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the bad news of the medical bill situation has me too sober to even kid myself into the dream -- which means that now hubby won't be forced into playing The Bad Cop, forced to introduce dreaming me to the sad reality that we cannot afford a puppy.

He, however, can console himself with his dog.

Me?

I guess I just get to take his dog out before it pees on the carpet and makes more work for me.

And blog to vent so that I don't end up scaring, scarring, the children. Or stuck in my bed. Again.