Dog Whispering in Reverse

Several years ago, I pulled into my driveway to find approximately twenty pairs of my husband’s underwear in the front yard. The dachshunds were playing tug-of-war with a pair and engaging in what came to be known as the Great Doggy-style Tighty-whitey Orgy. I asked them what the hell they were doing with the scattered skivvies, but being dogs, they only wagged their tails.

After I found out my husband was cheating on me, this is what I imagined they were trying to say to me that day:

Hey, girl, you know we love you. You’re the one who actually feeds us and takes the time to learn that, although we eat anything, our absolute favorite food on the planet is fried eggs. You’re a good gal, and you really don’t deserve all the crap this dude is pulling behind your back. That condom you found in his pocket last week? He didn’t buy it as a joke to encourage his friend to ask the pretty girl at the bar out. We heard him tell you that and couldn’t believe you bought it. But hell, we’re just dogs, and we can’t just come out and say, “You’re husband’s cheating on you.” So maybe if we literally air his dirty laundry in the front yard, you’ll catch the metaphor.

But they should have known I wouldn’t – or couldn’t – hear their message. After all, they’d tried to warn me about the affair before it ever started. We pulled up in our driveway one afternoon to find that they had intercepted the FedEx guy and shredded an employment contract offering my husband a heinous amount of money. The company was in Nashville, and he would be commuting during the week. He actually had to call the company and tell his prospective boss that the dogs ate his homework. Interestingly, he took the job, and that’s where the affair began.

We tried to warn you. We sniffed trouble the minute that FedEx guy stepped out of the truck. Shredding the papers was Laverne’s idea. She was trying to save you a lot of trouble, but instead we got in a heap of trouble. Since it cost us several mornings of fried eggs, we decided to open the package of sweet potato pancake mix when it arrived. It was delicious, but the bloating? You might have warned us we would be wobbling for a week.

My husband confessed that first affair, and I forgave him for several different reasons, the most important being the fact we had three children. But three years later, I should have known he was cheating again. Laverne and Shirley tried to warn me this time by chewing up their bed.

Again, it’s a metaphor, dumbass. We’ve torn up our bed, knowing you’ll say, “Well, you dumb dogs, you’ve made your bed, and now you’ll have to lie in it. Oh wait, there’s no bed for you to lie in because you’ve torn it up!” Don’t you get it? Your cheating husband has torn up your marriage bed, and you need to let him feel the consequences of the mess he’s made. He needs to sleep on the cold, hard concrete until he straightens up.

I filed for divorce. And one might think that would be the end of the subliminal dachshund messages. But I pulled up in my driveway one day after a weekend trip to find an assortment of my shoes, the kids’ belongings, and about 70 yards of toilet paper scattered over the front lawn.

It could only be the dachshunds.

In my haste to get to the airport on time, I’d failed to make sure the door from the house out to the garage was pulled tightly closed. Since we were only going to be gone overnight, I’d left the dachshunds with plenty of food and water and left the garage door open by about six inches, enough for them to squeeze under to get into the garage to sleep at night.

While the kids and I were gone, they figured out the door wasn’t completely closed, and they managed to push it open. Then they proceeded to have a party while their parent was away.

They had gone in my closet and pulled out one shoe from every pair. Some were in the living room, and some were in the laundry room. The most expensive ones, however, were chewed just enough to render them useless to me, and they were lying on the front lawn.

They had found Lauren’s candy stash and had opened ten or twelve red hot fireballs and then licked them on the white carpet. Red dye dotted the carpet in every bedroom.

They’d had great fun unrolling every toilet paper roll in every bathroom and dragging it through the house and out to the front yard. It looked like we had actually been rolled by a group of midgets who couldn’t reach the trees.

They found the 20-pound bag of dog food in the pantry and dragged it out of the house and into the yard, leaving a trail of dog food through the kitchen and laundry room. Ants were enjoying the trail of food, and I can imagine how many neighborhood dogs feasted in our yard while I was gone.

And of course there were piles of dog poop all over the house.

Hey, don’t be too mad! It’s another metaphor. Yeah, we know the cheating husband is gone. We’re just giving you a (short) leg up on the fact that your kids are almost teenagers. This kind of party could happen while you're away. Consider yourself warned.

An Ongoing Affair with a Jeep

One chilly December morning seven years ago, I went for a walk with my mother. We casually discussed the morning news, Diane Sawyer’s new haircut, and my crazy uncle’s latest attempts to open his own winery. He had sent my parents a bottle of his port -- Pork's Port -- that had exploded in their kitchen, permanently staining their pickled wood cabinets. Then, after a long and thoughtful pause, Mom mentioned that she had met my husband’s new assistant. Turning sideways to face me, she grabbed my arm and said, “She’s cute, and she’s very thin.” She then proceeded to tell me I had better “watch it,” because she suspected he was having an affair.

At the conclusion of our walk, she asked me to come inside because she had a gift for me. And this is not a lie: the woman handed me a diet and exercise book titled Look Great Naked. The implication, of course, was that if my husband was having an affair, I could fix the problem by losing fifteen pounds.

I was devastated. My mom thought my husband was cheating, and she had also just called me fat.

Four months later, I found myself in a twelve by twelve room of a rehab facility and listened as my husband read aloud the following statement, written in his own hand:

“I have struggled quite a bit with alcohol the past year, but what you don’t know is my behaviors that led to my drinking. Last summer, I became involved in an affair with a coworker. This affair has been ongoing and very difficult for me to break off, even after repeated attempts. The magnitude of this addictive relationship is such that I have even had contact with this person while in rehab.”

I heard nothing in this statement after he admitted to an “ongoing affair with a co-worker."

“Ongoing affair with a co-worker.”

Ongoing affair with a co-worker.

Ongoing affair with a co-worker.

What does “ongoing” mean? Is it still going on?

I knew who the co-worker was. I’d known it when my mom handed me the book about looking great naked. Deep down, I’d known. And now, on top of everything else, I felt stupid for not “knowing” until he confessed. In that moment, I felt as if I would never, ever be able to breathe again.

I also felt incredibly fat. That day, I quit eating. I lost seventeen pounds in one month by illogically reasoning that if Mom was right, I could win him back by losing weight.

And I began playing mind games with myself, games that I had no hope of winning. For instance, the “Co-worker” drove a black Jeep. I’d never paid much attention to Jeeps, but suddenly every other car on the road was a damn black Jeep. Every time I spotted one, my heart began pounding, and I suffered a slight panic attack. Every black Jeep was her. She’s on her way to see my husband. No! She’s following me. And I’m half-crazy, so they’ll get my kids. That bitch is going to steal my kids!

That affair eventually ended, but it was followed by several more, the most ridiculous of which was with a twenty-seven-year-old shot girl he met in a strip club. The great irony is that I finally looked really, really great naked, what with all the weight loss, but he kept right on cheating.

I finally mustered the strength to stand up for myself, realizing it wasn’t anything about me – my appearance, my flaws, my imperfections, even my crazy ideas about what kind of cars his lovers drove – that caused him to cheat. After several excruciating years of thinking I could fix him by fixing myself, I realized his affairs weren’t about me. And that’s when I filed for divorce.

My insane aversion to Jeeps lasted for nearly four years, though, until the day it dawned on me that I’d always liked Jeeps; in fact, I’d liked the “Co-worker’s” Jeep before I’d discovered my husband was sleeping with her. So the Jeep wasn’t the problem. It was the meaning I attached to her Jeep – and eventually all other Jeeps – that caused my pain. Further, if I could attach new meaning to Jeeps, and then to his affair, and even to the Look Great Naked book, I could change how I felt about them and, perhaps, even grow from those experiences. Confirmation that I was on the right track came when I discovered the following poem by the Sufi poet Rumi:

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

Who violently sweep your house

Empty of its furniture,

Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

Black Jeep was doing me a favor all along; I just hadn’t been able to see it. At that moment, I decided that, rather than cringing every time I saw a Jeep, I would say to myself, “It’s clearing me out for some new delight.” Over and over, Jeep after Jeep, I repeated the new mantra: “Clearing me out for some new delight.” Eventually, I even began to look for Jeeps, to search them out, like every Jeep I spotted was a clue that something good was just around the corner.

In fact, I’m secretly hoping that when my new delight shows up, he’ll be driving a Jeep.

Mentoring the Mistress

Not long after I filed for divorce, I took a trip with my sister and her twins, Faith and Grace, who were four at the time. My job, riding shotgun, was to keep the Disney movies playing. Since my children are out of the Disney stage, I’m a little out of touch with the current animated superstars, so they attempted to educate me. My sister described the little fish Dory in Finding Nemo.

“What did Dory say, girls?”

“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming!” they yelled in unison.

Just keep swimming. It’s the perfect divorce mantra.

On the same trip, we made the requisite toy-store stop at one of those outlet mall junk stores that sells the toys the big guys can’t unload. Grace picked up a Barbie doll called “Erica,” the spitting image of the other woman, the one I'd dubbed the "moderately intelligent Latina" after I discovered my husband's AdultFriendFinder stating he liked Latinas and that intelligence was only "moderately important" to him. Erica even had the same waist-length kinky, streaked hair.

I tried talking my niece out of Latina Barbie. I offered to buy her the store, but she was hung up on “Erica.” So I grudgingly paid for the trashy doll. We got out of the store, and Erica’s clothes promptly came off. And then I was ordered to put her dress back on. Great, I get to see Erica’s Latina titties. I was happy to note that they were better than the set my husband’s new hottie possessed.

“Now brush her hair,” Grace ordered.

“Oh, sweetie, I hate to tell you, but her hair’s tangled. I’m going to have to rip out a few chunks.”

Of course, Erica’s at the bottom of the closet by now, facedown and naked. Her hair’s been cut off with a pair of fingernail clippers. She’s wondering what happened to all the love and attention she was promised at the time of purchase. And Ken’s busy writing his next AdultFriendFinder ad.

A couple of weeks after Erica, I stumbled across a book on the paperback table at Barnes & Noble. Becoming Latina in 10 Easy Steps sounded like the self-help I certainly did not need, but a morbid sense of curiosity mixed with a demented sense of humor demanded the purchase. The author’s recommendations: date Mexican men, learn to cook Mexican food, and mentor an at-risk Latina.

I suppose I could go out with a Mexican man (Rafael Nadal is Latin, would he count?), and I already cook a mean fajita. The suggestion that caught my fancy, however, was the mentoring.

Suppose I meet and mentor my husband’s Latina. I could introduce her to my three teenagers, the crazy dogs, the parasite-riddled cat, the pet snake, and the Lithuanian exchange student. Then I could show her the toenail clippings he leaves on his nightstand for me to discard. I could teach her how to change the sheets when he comes in so drunk he wets the bed. And then she could retrieve his underwear from the front yard after the dachshunds pilfer through the gym bag he left in the garage and literally air his dirty laundry in front of the whole neighborhood.

I could set her alarm for six o’clock every morning to make the kids’ breakfast and pack nutritious lunches. Meanwhile, his ass is still snoring . . . and most likely not in her bed. He’s been out all night with some other little Latina who’s the backup to the backup gal.

I’d say she qualifies as an at-risk Latina. But I'll pass on the mentoring and the attempts at becoming Latina. Being me is good enough for me.