Tegan: Chapter 2

Continued from Chapter 1: Origins https://sylviawoodham.wixsite.com/home/post/the-story-of-tegan Chapter 2: Discovery

All of this chaos brought on by bad behavior of two entire families, and being in totally over my head, I survived. I survived with the help of this one-eyed, perfectly imperfect little dog with a heart and personality five times her size. She was a Rescue Pup 100% in every sense of the word.

The spring of 2010, this little one-eyed dog entered my life and changed it forever. I had set parameters for how I wanted to approach my new companion—I am not a believer in treating dogs like people. I also expected her to be a collie breed, and researched what to expect from an intelligent and high energy breed. Plus, I was not going to spend the rest of my life having a dog that peed every time I came home.

As a result, our dynamic began with some of the following facets:

1. Learning how to act toward her that was not dominant, to build her confidence and make her less submissive. Including, not standing over her or using high-pitched voices, or petting her on the head. I squatted in front of her, on her level, and I scratched her under the chin.

2. Taking her to dog parks for socialization so other dogs could teach her what it meant to be a dog, and how to interact with other dogs through their own corrections. I discovered she was a fearless rough and tumble dog. She wanted to race the big dogs—from 90-pound German shepherds to big labs—and use her speed to beat them, and she did not care in the slightest if they ran into her and bowled her over. She got up and got back out there.

3. Absolutely, true to form, if I didn't tell her what the rules were, she made up rules of her own. However, she wanted to learn my rules. For example, no way was I going to spend the rest of my life having her bark at me in the morning to wake me up, or eat, or go outside.

However, I also wanted her to feel secure and safe after her experience, so she was allowed to sleep at the foot of the bed, and when I was not sleeping, was given as many snuggles and cuddles as she wanted. One of the best decisions I made in her training was when she tried to make up the rule “bark at my person in the morning when I'm hungry.” I rolled over until she stopped, and taught her instead that coming to snuggle with me was the successful rule to follow to get what she wanted.

The result of establishing this rule from the start was years of hide-and-seek games under the covers where she tried to dig me out, and lots of snuggles to wake up to, with the cutest face in the world looking down on me.

My rule was: Tegan goes with me everywhere she can. And soon we were inseparable. My goal was to help this little pup thrive with this big heart and personality. I wanted to make space for her to be herself. In those early days, the way she mooned over me, it was clear she was immensely grateful for the opportunity to find her person. I had credit card and student debt from years of instability, but this little dog believed in me 300%.

I was starting to demonstrate signs of PTSD in my graduate program. There was one “management” class that drove me crazy, with a professor who was a 6th grade teacher with a PhD. (These are the types of professors I do the worst under—my microbio teacher was the same, and apparently everyone complained about that course.) It was a small program with faculty you could count on one hand. Therefore, having a problem with one of them meant doom.

After the challenges of my undergraduate program, followed by my literary and language studies, the fact that we read a chapter ABOUT Machiavelli, instead of a book BY Machiavelli really got to me. Considering my career paths, I had thought about the foreign service, but concluded from my internship I disliked working for the government immensely.

While trying to figure out what to do, whether to transfer to a different program, I enrolled in a literature class, and started working for the census. Another rule I wanted to set with the young pup was that we were going to have an active life together, so she was clear about that expectation, and boy was she on board!

Amidst my blossoming PTSD, and untreated years of trauma, I discovered she was a ray of light Every. Single. Day. She was always happy, and so easy and well-behaved when she made mistakes I had genuinely forgotten she was still a puppy. A decade later when people observed her easygoing temperament and the fact that I could take her everywhere with me, sometimes they would ask if she was always like that. She came that way, from day one. How to Train Your Dragon was released that year, and I took heart in this dragon and person who were both damaged but perfect in their pain. She was my Toothless.

We quickly began having adventures together, and I quickly encountered another discovery about Tegan—she was a runner. I did not know how to train a dog to go off leash, but she was absolutely the wrong dog for it. She was outgoing and social. It was clear perhaps the dogs that beat her up—she had been so excited maybe she jumped in their faces, since she did that with everyone else. She never met a stranger.

In chapter 1 I mentioned I kind of brought her in before moving house… Apparently I fooled no one, despite my attempts to be clever and sneak her out of the house in a duffle bag to go to the dog park.

However, I did move into the new pet-friendly place, and took her home to my parents for Easter, where she met my brother’s dog. The older dog was territorial at first and learned to eat her food quickly instead of picking at it, but it was a matter of time before they were playing together, and my dog was attached to the other dog's hip.

This began a long friendship, and another new rule she learned very quickly that weekend was the rule of being housebroken. My mother loved everything about this pup overflowing with personality. At the end of the summer, it finally felt saf-ER to move home, but not to live with my parents. A silver lining of the economic crisis was being able to buy a place nearby for me and pup, and my mother specifically found one with window seats she wanted the dog to enjoy.

This entered in the next chapter of my life, which started with a lot of rebuilding, but also feeling more secure, in a gated community with a dog as my security system. However, healing was not a short journey. I started working at a pricing warehouse part time, and was experiencing a crisis of faith. Emotionally I was numb and not ready to enter any relationship. However, my social life was taking off being back in a bigger city with more intellectual peers and social groups.

Having a dog while dating is an excellent judge of character! Besides, at home, besides trying to implement boundaries and crate discipline, she was a delight. She has earned many nicknames during her life, but Crazy Pup was a fun one. Full of energy, she would zoom across the apartment, and on rainy days I had to invent games to try to use her energy.

These included: letting her into the back stairwell so she would automatically run down to the bottom, and then calling her back up, to repeat the process as many times as I could. Another fun game I developed was meant just to get her to jump on and off the bed 20 or more times in a row, and boy she loved jumping! This was accomplished by throwing a toy into another room and having her bring it back to the bed, or by holding a toy on the bed for her to jump up, and then in the air for her to jump off.

I also discovered she was Magic Pup, the dog who could go for 14 hours without needing to use the toilet, if necessary. It meant I did still need to take her for one hour-long walk per day usually to use her energy, or a dog park for her to run it off and sleep a few hours.

Within these months I knew she was my favorite dog we had ever had. She was our fifth family dog. My mother’s first dog was a good-natured spaniel that let me pull on his ears and tail as a child. That was my mother’s dog, and she cried when he died. Then I had a rabbit, and another spaniel, while my brother got a beagle. We had sweet good dogs. The beagle was dumb as rocks, and sadly my spaniel was sweet, but not much personality. Then my brother’s dog has preceded mine.

This bundle of joy with a huge heart and personality quickly stuck her hooks deep in my heart forever. I was equal parts proud of her, as well as feeling satisfied with my training choices as she grew in confidence. We went to one dog park with aggressive dogs that made her back fur bristle, so I avoided it—not wanting her to become aggressive. Despite her making the rule that when her person left her at home she was upset and chewed things that belonged to her person... What smells to a dog like their person the most? shoes. There were severe casulties. My tango shoes, gold strappy heels. Special shoes I had found that could not be replaced. My mother made some attempt to rescue pairs that were less damaged, like orange platform heels.... but Tegan loved hosey things. This included a bike pump from a neighbor I had borrowed, and was expensive to replace. It also included computer cables, and led me to discover exactly how amazing Apple customer service truly was. The chargers were around 90, which I had to pay to replace the first time she found it tastey. The second time I went into the Apple store, they gave me a 10% discount, but the third time they just handed me a new charger and waived the fee.

My father recommended family counseling to try to help my mother and I communicate better. My mother was convinced I wouldn’t talk to her, but the pain that I needed to unpack was something she did not want to hear. It resulted in her talking at me a lot and making inconsiderate criticism and accusation. I had never been understood in my family, so the inability for anyone to understand what I was experiencing was nothing new. However, my mother was not equipped for counseling. To her it was about convincing who was to blame, and playing the victim, and I was at fault, like I had been since being a child.

They said that intelligent collie breeds will have the understanding of a toddler, and she demonstrated this in a variety of hilarious behaviors. She LOVED to be in the middle of social groups, people, and especially her family. We would sit in the office at home, and she would be in the middle trying to mouth words to us to participate in our conversation. Tegan’s attempt to speak like a human lasted throughout her life, but whatever she was trying to say, I learned to recognize it was an attempt to communicate something to me. In her final days, I think she still understood my conversation with the vet.

By the winter, I took my first trip abroad in years, coming back with a clearer head, and choosing to leave a situation where I felt like I was doing all the work emotionally, and it was a one-way thing with my mother. At the same time, I guess, I too took in another stray, so to speak.

A friend from the smaller town wanted to move to the city and I let her stay with me. This turned out to be good, and not so good. She had grown up in an underprivileged environment, but since my lifelong friends were diverse racially and socio-economically, I did not know or consider any factors that might be involved. On the one hand, she understood trauma. It was the first time I had been able to unpack and talk about my experience and sob, and feel the pain. In that regard I was grateful to have her as a house guest.

However, it extended a bit too long, and she read my journal, which was not okay with me. Though, overall, we talked about real things—trauma, family, both having brothers who bore resentment when we tried to get out and succeed. We talked about messages at church that families equip people with more or less life preparation. We talked about how sad it was that Tegan was fixed, and could not have puppies, being so one of a kind, and she admired how I had supported and helped the dog's personality to develop and thrive.

She also observed how alive I was after returning abroad, and it became clear that things in my life needed to change. He and I had planned to move to Germany, and I felt lost not sure what direction to go in with that situation becoming so bad. It was a year later, in the winter of 2012, I won two international first class tickets anywhere I wanted to go. My cousin in Amsterdam had a baby, so I visited her. It was there, staying in a vacation flat, I looked across a snow-covered field to the river to see a dog playing, and had the dream to live in Europe with Tegan.