Four Is Enough

From The New York Times, by NEBTR member and Foster Parent Julie Klam:


It’s a recent March morning in our small New York apartment, and my husband is looking at me with a half-smile on his face. Not the kind of half-smile that says, “I will love this woman till the end of my days.” It’s the kind that says, “I told you it was going to cost over $300 to get that rug cleaned, even though you said it wouldn’t because you had a coupon from the Internet.” So while the man from the rug-cleaning place goes on and on, calculator in hand, about how very, very bad our rug stains are — and the smell! — I give my husband my own half-smile, which says, “Oops.”

We’ve been living with these four dogs. It’s all an accident: we had one dog, a Boston terrier (a female), and then in August we fostered an elderly dog, another terrier, to save her from being put to sleep, and then somehow in October she had puppies, just two, small-size, no bigger than teeny baby mice when they were born — the three of them fit in a little box from FreshDirect. And it was so sweet how this dog from the streets, who’d been through hell, was able to have her puppies in a nice home and not in a shelter. … Well, if she’d stayed in the shelter she wouldn’t have had them because they were going to put her down. But now here she was, getting to be their mother, and to take care of them. And we were so amazed and so moved that we, or I, decided that she and her puppies would always have a home with us and we would all live happily ever after.

Until a few days later when we realized that her ancient body wasn’t providing her babies with enough milk, and we had to spend $500 at the vet. (We’d been to a vet with her before, a vet who thought she had Cushing’s disease! Silly! She was pregnant!) And so we got the formula and the little bottles and the eyedroppers the vet said to get, and we fed the puppies every two hours, and after a while the mom’s milk finally came in — hurray! — so we were able to sleep through the night again. But then the mother got in a fight with our original dog and got her cornea scratched. And though I never go anywhere, I was about to go to Miami for two days for work, and the vet said the mother couldn’t nurse while she was on antibiotics: “Sorry.” My husband would have to feed the puppies every two hours while taking care of our young daughter; I told the vet that just wasn’t an option, because I was already on thin ice, so the vet sent me to a fancy emergency place that was able to fix her eye for the weekend. It was $500 for the regular vet, another $1,000 for the emergency vet. But it was worth anything to keep my husband from having to nurse those puppies for 48 hours by himself.

After that we decided we couldn’t keep all the dogs, just the original dog and the male puppy, and maybe the mother because she’d been through so much and she was so old and the idea of putting her in another home brought tears to our (my) eyes. The problem was that I’d become very attached to the female puppy, so I didn’t want to give her up either.

At first, when the puppies started leaving the little box to do their business, it was sort of cute — teeny puddles and tiny poopies — and I tried to teach them to go on the Wee Wee pads ($39 a pack). Then after they got their shots ($875) it was O.K. to take them out to housebreak them. But they screamed on the leash. Like, “Yow!” And walking four dogs in the cold wasn’t that fun for me, either; four dogs like to go in four different directions. (A couple of times, I was this close to letting them all go — after all, if you love something, you’re supposed to set it free.) So I decided to put off housebreaking till spring, and in the meantime let them go on the Wee Wee pads, or near the Wee Wee pads. But usually they went “nowhere near” the Wee Wee pads. They were born in our daughter’s room, so that’s where they liked to go, in particular the needlepoint rug with the pale blue and pink roses.
The result is that we’ve been living in a litter box. And my husband hasn’t been happy about it. (He calls the mother the “Trojan Dog.”) Somehow I thought that if we just got my daughter’s rug cleaned, things might go back to normal. I called the rug cleaners, and over the phone they said it was something a square foot, under 10 bucks, so I said, “Sold!”
But now the guy is here with his calculator. And my husband, who is putting his coat on and getting ready to leave for work, says, “So far they’ve cost us more than a month’s rent, Julie.” (It’s never good when he uses my name; he does it so I can’t pretend he’s talking to someone else.) As he gets in the elevator, I lean out into the hallway, and I yell, “I’ll figure something out.” And I will. I swear I will.
Julie Klam is the author of a memoir, “Please Excuse My Daughter.”