Sept. 3, 2020
Getting a pandemic puppy seemed like a bad idea for a blended family. Until we did it.
Even as a child, I never wanted a dog. When I was a longtime single through my 20s, a friend once asked me who I’d rather be with: a partner who had a dog or a partner who had a cat. I said, “a kid.”
My stepdaughter, Louise, is 10 years old and like many girls her age, she has a nurturing and maternal streak. She’s attuned to the needs of her parents, friends, babies and animals. At the apartment her father and I share in Hudson, N.Y., we don’t have a backyard or pets; at her mom’s 40 minutes away, they have a dog, a cat and two horses. We always assumed she was getting the best of both worlds: city and country life.
In early May, after her elementary school in Catskill, N.Y., closed for the year (they’d been temporarily closed since March), she told me matter-of-factly that she had anxiety, a word I’d never heard her use in relation to herself. She hadn’t been sleeping well since March. She’d fall asleep easily, only to wake up an hour later, wide-awake, on edge. We tried everything: the Calm app, sleep programs, meditations, warm milk, reading, yoga, no television, talking about her fears. We blamed it on the leftover ice cream cake from my birthday that she loved eating at nighttime. We blamed it on the fact that for years when one of us was out of town, we’d let her sleep in our bed. Plus, we told ourselves,kids around the world were having a hard time sleeping during the pandemic.
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