Learning to sit
I’m training my sister’s dog for her this month. Lola is a hound/dinosaur mix with black eyeliner and soft short fawn-colored fur. She sings the song of her people with strong lungs and her paws are prehistoric in size. She believes she is Baby, and she is. But even anxious babies have to learn to co-regulate and self-soothe, and that is why she is here.
Every time I do this puppy training thing, I am flooded with compassion for my own brain, for the brains of people with trauma and ADHD. The need for comfort, stability, reassurance, routine, rewards for focus—it’s so easy to love and forgive a dog for these things but when it’s me talking to myself in my own head, suddenly I don’t deserve the patience I would give a puppy. I should be over this already, I tell myself. I should know better. This is stuff I know, why can’t I just move on from these needs? I know why I am this way (acceptance!), I know how to work with or around it (negotiation!), I know that it’s not my fault (I stopped bargaining!). It all makes sense and has discrete origins and limits and yet somehow I cannot lend myself the patience and understanding that I have in unlimited, generous supply for these dogs.
Lola wants affection, reassurance. I tell her to sit and then when she calms herself enough to sit and focus on me, I pour on the praise. She’s a good girl, what a good sit, what a good dog. If I were to give myself the same treatment—Eve did some writing! what good writing, what a good job you did!—I would not believe myself. Surely there is a catch, surely I fucked it up and am waiting to discover my failure and resume the regularly scheduled self-loathing in just a minute or two from now. I would never do that to a dog or to a child, but the authority figure in my brain will always do that to me.
Today I picked at ate the first tomatoes from my garden. I planted them later than I could have, but we had a late frost and my first batch withered and died. I am delighted to have these fruits to snack on while I wander the yard waiting for Lola to remember it’s time to pee, and I have no interest in judging my plants for being behind the “schedule” set by others—the fruiting of other gardens earlier in the summer is irrelevant to mine, which had unique conditions and setbacks to get to this day. I’m happy to have it at all, I’m grateful for the time and work that it took to get here. These tomatoes taste so sweet and rich, they are perfect.
I suppose all this is to say that I’m working on revising the memoir again. I’m stuttering, lots of false starts attempted and abandoned. I feel like the whole of it is a waste, the prose below my true capabilities, the plotting sloppy, the sentences dull and flat. But really, if I were reasonable with myself, I would embrace that all as the effects of a hard frost late in the season last year, a chilling experience that killed the momentum and growth that had been developing. I lay fallow and did other things, waiting for my excitement to return, to believe again that working on this book is worth my time and valuable to the world somehow. And here we are, pushing forward again, learning how to sit once more to focus on the task ahead.