(update April 29, 2007) — The post below is one I’ve kept private for some time now. I decided the time was right to make it public. Part of the reason why is that Jupiter was put down.
The rest of the reason why is that we reconciled with my Mother and things are on much better ground. My hand has healed, the nail fell off and grew anew. My Mother seems to have taken a healthier perspective on things during our absence.
Its all very sad. We realized that there was little choice for Jupi. I still feel sick to my stomach about it. I miss him when we go to CT. Yet, what could we do? My mother couldn’t handle him. Even I had become afraid of him. A warden from the State of Connecticut came and shot him with a dart. Then a local vet put him down. I wasn’t there. Its really awful. I feel so bad. No creature as strong and healthy and beautiful as he was should have to be put down like that. Yet again, what were we to do? Sometimes life is just really, really ugly and painful. Jupiter, I am so sorry.
Around Christmas time, after not talking to my Mother for months, we sent her a plant… a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree in a pot. Well, that brought things back around. We’ve started visiting again on weekends, although usually just for the afternoon. She is behaving herself. It is good not to be fighting. As for the things I say below, well they are true. But let me also say I know my Mother loves me very much and would have done anything for me. She just has her problems. Problems that made her an odd parent. Problems that skew her perception of reality. She is who she is. My Mother… and now the original post:
(December 6, 2006) — I’m writing off the cuff tonight – no spell check and minimal backspacing. Infact, I’m not even going to proofread this before I click the Publish button for all to see. To hell with dictionary.com and the critic within. Commence writing.
Someone once said it better to be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt – a maxim I violate frequently.
Yes, I’m a fool perhaps; but there may be a strength in knowing that one is a fool. The older I get the more foolish I seem to become. I wish I were 21 again. I knew everything then AND I was cute. I think I’m the most foolish and dim-witted forty year old ever. I’m certainly not very cute. I wonder what fifty will be like.
Now starting topic in three… two… one… MY MOTHER IS INSANE
Its corny as hell to dislike your parents. Its even more corny to blame a life of misery and pain on your Mother. They always blame the Mother. Suddenly I’m starting to feel the breeze that is my muse blow wind into my sails.
And please remember I told you I’m writing off the cuff.
My wife and I are used to spending our weekends at my Mother’s house in Connecticut I have spent weekends at my Mother’s house ever since I moved out. Weekends have always been when I see my children, whose mother and I parted ways seven years ago.
Usually we drive up on Friday night and come back to the City on Sunday night. We take the kids out and entertain them, take my mother out to dinner and then come home. My wife has spent every weekend like this with me since we were married almost three years ago.
My mother is 82. She lives in a three bed room house alone with two dogs. One dog is very old and is allowed to relieve herself on the floor. The other dog is very much in his prime and housebroken, but takes pleasure in leaving his mark on any available vertical space (given the opportunity) on ingress and egress from the house.
So she’s old, all alone and lives in a big smelly house.
The last time we were at my Mother’s house, the dog who leaves his mark, bit me. Hard. He’s bitten me before. He’s bitten my wife. He’s bitten the dog warden. He’s bitten almost anyone who has had much to do with him. He’s a big Rottweiler and when he bites, he bites hard.
Now before you start going all Cesar Milan on me let me tell you this is not my first Rottweiler. This is not my first dog. It is not even my first difficult Rottweiler. Its a bit of a sad tale. This dog’s name is Jupiter. My old dog Axel, also a Rottie, died when he was 9. I had him since he was six months old and bought him from a breeder to whom he had been returned for being too difficult. We had our power struggles, got help from a professional trainer, and eventually Axel became my best friend. He died in June of 1999. I was still living in Connecticut at that time with plenty of room and time for such a serious dog. Rottweilers are serious dogs.
During the winter of 2000/2001 my Mother started suggesting that I should get another Rottweiler. I was living alone in a studio apartment in New York City and working full time. I had neither the time nor the space for a dog like Jupiter. During this time I was also having a relationship with a woman in Connecticut whom my mother couldn’t stand. My mother has never accepted any woman I’ve been involved with. I was also trying to be a weekend father to my kids while shuttling from this woman’s house to my mother’s house. To make matters worse, the woman resented my kids. Yes, my head was up my ass. It was a very difficult time. This was the time my Mother began to insist I get another Rottweiler. She gave me the money to buy one. She quoted a story I told her, completely out of context, of how my first dog, Axel, once jumped into bed and pushed my girlfriend out onto the floor. It was a very funny story and very cute when it happened and totally harmless. But you see my Mother thought that if I were to get another Rottweiler it would solve the ‘other woman’ problem for her because my weekends would simply be too much to manage with her (my mother), the kids, the other woman, AND a big dog. The new dog would infact push said ‘other woman’ right out of the picture. I went along with it, so its nobody’s fault but mine. But I need to tell you the entire story.
So I found Jupiter and he was the most adorable puppy you’ve ever seen. I went to see him and his brother when they were about eight weeks old. Jupiter was the boldest and seemed less shy and more outgoing than his brother. I made my choice and brought him home. Weekends weren’t too bad for a while because the kids were excited and my girlfriend liked animals. I tried taking care of, house training him, etc in New York in my apartment and with my job. I hated leaving him crated all day. I was really alone, no friends or room mates… nobody to help out, check in on him… eventually I started leaving him in Connecticut when I’d return to the City and eventually it became his permanent home.
I know all about the alpha dog boss take control thing. I told you, I’ve already been there and done this with success and with professional help. Jupiter is another story. Granted, Jupiter didn’t really get a fair shake since he was ‘born’ into a bunch of chaos and I really didn’t have the time or space to train or take care of him. However, Jupiter has been through professional training and knows all his basic commands, etc. He just has a screw loose. Even the trainer said it, “he’s got a glitch”. Even as a very little puppy he’d have these moments where he would spasm and start snapping and growling for no reason discernible. I can’t take him to the vet. No vet will touch him. I’ve done the best I can for him. I can’t euthanize him. He’s really become my Mother’s pet; but of course she’s “Been taking care of [my] dog…” and I’m so ungrateful.
At least a third of my motivation to go to Connecticut over the past few years has been to see Jupiter, the majority of the rest of my motivation is to see the kids with waves of guilt frequently eclipsing all other reasons – loyal sons visit their little old mother’s every weekend, don’t they?
Friday nights have traditionally been a big doggie love fest where Jupi (his nickname) runs in circles of doggie delight and we play fetch the sqweeky toy until I’m drenched in dog spit. Usually I try and get one or two more ’sessions’ in with Jupi before I return to the City.
The last time I was at my Mother’s, about two months ago, we were playing with Jupi. He had inverted his round metal food dish and was sliding it around on the wood floor like some kind of whirling dervish shell game kind of thing. He got the dish stuck under the easy chair and went into a frantic fit of pawing and barking at the chair to get the dish. My wife suggested I clip his leash on him and lead him away. I knew this was a very bad idea at this particular moment. None the less, being the fool that I am, I reached down to clip the leash and WHAM. My left hand felt like somebody had slammed the car door on it. I ran yelling to the bathroom and washed it off and wrapped a towel around it. My mother asked what all the commotion was about. I told her what had happened. The dog bit me. The first thing she said to me was, “Please don’t go to the ER…” The reason she didn’t want me to go to the ER was because they would have taken a report and called the dog warden – the dog warden Jupi had already bitten, and the same dog warden who took the report when Jupi bit my wife. At that point I wanted to kill the dog myself and it didn’t seem like it would be such a bad thing if the dog warden DID take charge of the situation. The sad truth is that he is a dangerous dog. He’s never bitten my mother, but she has absolutely no control over him.
I went back out to the living room, my wife had since ordered Jupi back into his crate which he did without hesitation (I think he knew he really fucked up). My thirteen year old son had come down from upstairs and was totally freaked out about what had happened. I showed them both my hand and they thought I should go to the ER. I had once been bitten severely by a cat, and developed a serious infection many years ago (long, long story) so I went back to my Mother and said I thought maybe I really should have it checked out.
Her face dropped and she seethed, “You SON OF A BITCH…” and then she went into a tirade about my WIFE! I don’t even remember everything she said, but I’m fairly sure it ran along the usual lines about how ungrateful I am and how my wife is only after her money. I told her she could fuck her money. She called my wife “THAT WOMAN” and told me to “Get that WOMAN out of my house…”
My wife is one of the nicest people you could meet and someone I love deeply. It makes no sense.
Unfortunately little of my life with my Mother has made sense. My parents divorced when I was seven and my only sibling was a brother with Down’s Syndrome. My mother’s entire life was devoted to caring for my brother. She took care of him as one would care for an infant until he died at age 27. This is the part where I get to say I didn’t get the attention I deserved. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t get it; it was the kind of attention I got that was the problem.
From very early on, perhaps just before the time of their divorce, my mother would confide in me about her problems with my Father. MY father. MY daddy. She said things to me about my father that no child should ever have to hear. Things I couldn’t possibly have understood. Things that would literally drive me crazy trying to reconcile since all these bad things were about my Father, of whom I was HALF. I was her confidant when she had nobody else to talk to. I was her date when she had nobody else.
That weekend the dog bit me was the last weekend I saw her. I did not go to the ER. I did not get an infection, although the nail bed on the thumb of my left hand stays black and the nail has begun to fall off. It reminds me every time I look at it or bump it against something about that lovely evening.
I did not speak to her over Thanksgiving, which is remarkable – this is a person who was jealous if I spent so much as Flag Day with anyone other than her.
Its a very difficult time. I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel empowered. I just feel fucking sad. All these years and she just doesn’t understand. She can’t love someone just because I love them. She can’t just be happy for me. She can’t just love me without conditions. I can’t just love her or bring someone into her life without it being about ‘her money’. She can’t see anything from any other point of view than her own. She can’t feel what anyone else is feeling. Her feelings are the only ones that matter.
Jupiter, NYC 2001
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