We got a dog when I gave up on the future
The problem with promises is that the future can’t keep anything.
Nothing unites siblings like a shared complaint. In my house, the complaint has been “Mom and Dad haven’t kept their promise to get us a dog.”
They’re right.
We’ve been promising the kids we’ll get a dog someday, for a long time. Like every promise, this one’s fulfillment existed in the future. A future where we were more prepared, had more time, more space. We’d make the promise thinking we knew the future, because we knew our present. But then our present would change and so the future would too. And that new future had never held the fulfillment of our promise. So the promise couldn’t be kept. The dog kept moving into other futures based on our new present. Those futures disappeared too. And so we never got a dog.
I felt relieved, secretly.
When the girls were very little, we’d say, “We’ll get a dog when you are old enough to help us take care of it.” I couldn’t imagine them getting older. I thought our floors would always be sticky with baby food, our walls always colorful with crayon. But when the girls did get older, I got unexpectedly, but very happily, pregnant. So then we’d say, “We’ll get a dog when your little sister is potty trained.” Potty training seemed very far off, which was good. I couldn’t imagine a puppy and our surprise baby in the same moment.
I couldn’t imagine leaving Oakland, how can you leave the place you’ve been found?
The potty training promise wasn’t always persuasive so we’d reinforce it with our small Oakland home. We lived in what was once the shopkeeper quarters above an old general store. Two bedrooms, one bath, very little square footage. “We’ll get a dog if we ever leave Oakland. We don’t have room for a dog and five humans in this tiny space.” I couldn’t imagine leaving Oakland, how can you leave the place you’ve been found? But we did leave Oakland, pushed out by housing and childcare costs.
But then, seven weeks after we moved, the pandemic started. The present changed the future again. So we started saying, “We’ll get a dog once Brontë is potty trained and the world calms down.” And what I really meant by that last bit was, “I can’t imagine adding a puppy to our lives right now. This feels like the end of the world. I am not sure how to get the creatures I’m already responsible for through this, let alone another.” And so even once Brontë was potty trained, we kept repeating the last part of that promise, “We’ll get a puppy when the world calms down.” I couldn’t imagine the world ever calming down.
The problem with promises is that the future can’t keep anything.
We can each only sustain so much in any given version of the present. I don’t think any of our promises were unreasonable. We meant to keep them when we made them. The problem is that the future can’t keep anything, not even our promises. And we were acting like it could.
The world has not calmed down. I am not sure it will calm down, during anything I’ll ever call the present. Instead, I have an increasing sense that the world is actually ending. That maybe the world has always been ending. Which means I finally found the promise that would have always kept a puppy in the future. Achievement unlocked!
So why did I fall asleep Monday morning at 2am, under the kitchen table, with an eight week old puppy breathing into my side? Well. The immediate answer is that we finally got a dog. She came home Sunday. And for all my worry about only getting a dog when we were ready, the crate I bought her was comically small. She couldn’t even crawl into it, and so certainly couldn’t sleep in it. I didn’t realize my mistake until we built the crate at 9pm Sunday night. It was too late to go out and buy another. So, after many failed attempts at a DIY crate, she and I ended up under the table together.
The longer answer is, I’m done making promises. The future refuses to keep them for me and I can’t seem to keep the future for them. Instead I am trying to understand the promise of the present. That moment right-now where we are each kept and can do the keeping. The dog shifted from a promise to be kept, to something our family could keep together. And suddenly, Riley and I couldn’t wait to bring one home.
I’m done making promises. The future refuses to keep them for me and I can’t seem to keep the future for them.
Did you know that dogs were domesticated before humans figured out agriculture? What does the future look like without even the idea of the growth and harvest cycle of crops to frame it? What kind of fulfillment can it hold? Maybe there was only the present, that moment right now where we are each kept and can do the keeping. Some theories say the dogs domesticated us, not the other way around. Maybe they keep us as much as we keep them.
The girls are predictably thrilled. While holding the dog, my ten year old wondered aloud, “What are we going to complain about now?!” I told her I was sure they’d find something to complain about….in the future.
We named her Murphy, after Murphy’s law. The original epigram says, “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”
We’ve always loved Christopher Nolan’s reworking of the law in his movie, Interstellar.
In the movie, a little girl asks her dad why he and her mom named her Murphy. Murphy’s law is all about things going wrong. Why did they name her after something bad? He replies,
“Murphy’s law doesn’t mean something bad will happen. What it means is whatever can happen, will happen. And that sounded just fine to us.”
Whatever can happen is sometimes bad - like car wrecks, climate change, death. But whatever can happen is sometimes good - like rocket ships, star formation, life. Murphy seemed like a hopeful name for a puppy.
Murphy seemed like a hopeful name for a puppy. What can happen is … everything. She’ll help us remember.
