Now it’s just Annie and me

Sue Fagalde Lick Alzheimer's Disease, Annie and Chico, childlessness

My family has boiled down to just my dog Annie and me. Think of us as a cautionary tale for those considering marrying an older man and not having children. Someday he might be gone, and there is a chance his children–if he has them–will no longer consider you part of the family. Or perhaps you and Mr. Right moved far away and now you don’t have the means to move back to where they live.

Last week, I told about how I need to give my other dog, Chico, away. I have not found a home for him yet. He is still in the kennel. But I do have lots of people looking, so I’m hopeful. I really don’t feel that I can bring him back to the house. He’s too much for me to handle alone. When I started this particular dog-journey, I had Fred here to help. For those who haven’t been following along, my husband is in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s Disease. Who could have predicted that when we got married almost 25 years ago?

Meanwhile, Annie and I have really bonded. Through an artic freeze and through the current barrage of rain and wind, we have spent most of our time together. We walk together, we eat together, we sleep together. When I cry, she licks my face. When she wakes me up in the middle of the night, I stagger down the hall to let her out. Sometimes she just wants company. I understand. We have both lost our partners. I no longer feel like her mother; we’re companions, housemates. We take care of each other. With luck, we’ll grow old together.

At least I’m not the weird old lady with a dozen cats. I’m too allergic to them!

Minus one baby dog

Sue Fagalde Lick Chico and Annie, dog jumping fence, dogs as child substitutes, seeking home for dog

Last weekend, things reached a crisis point with my dog Chico. He not only can jump the outer four-foot fence in our yard, but he learned on Saturday how to get over the six-foot fence (the one the fence guy said no dog could escape). The minute I let him out, he was over the fence and gone. Often I could see him roaming just beyond the fences, but he wouldn’t come and he wouldn’t stay. Meanwhile, I was getting reports of Chico terrorizing my neighbors’ pets. Some of them have guns and are not afraid to use them. Of course, anyone could sue me or get me in other big trouble if this giant black lab/pit bull mix went after them, their children or their pets.

I hobbled him with a harness while I went to church Saturday evening. Two hours later, nothing was left but the metal rings. Chico and his sister Annie ate the harness. They’re equally good at destroying any kind of collar.

People have suggested new fencing, keeping him on a chain, or putting a weight on his collar. I can’t afford a whole new fence, and I can’t abuse him just to keep him here.

Crying hard, I took him to a kennel to stay for a while until I can find him a new home. I still have Annie, who is smaller and has not learned to jump the fences. Yet. I will selfishly hang on to her as long as I can. I raised both dogs from eight weeks to 21 months. I took them to school, walked them, kept their shots up to date and made sure they stayed warm and safe. I love them both. But with my husband gone to the nursing home, I’m on my own, and I can’t handle both big dogs. These are the first pets for which I actually called myself their mom. I talked about them all the time, loved to show them off, sent their pictures all over the Internet. But they are dogs, not children, and reality must prevail.

I put an ad in the paper today to find a new home for Chico. It was hard not to cry. I raised him to almost two years old. Except for his need to run and terrorize other dogs, he’s the sweetest pup. He’ll be a great companion for someone. In dog years, he’s a young adult. Time to send him on to his next adventure.

This would be a good time to have human adult children and grandchildren to help me, keep me company and put things in perspective, but I don’t have them. Now that my husband isn’t here, my stepchildren have chosen not to contact me. So it’s just me and Annie now. She’s the cute puppy in my photo, except she’s all grown up.

Is there a conclusion to this story? I suppose the moral is that no matter how much we love them and treat them as our children, they are still dogs, and sometimes we have to let them go.

Holiday orphans

Sue Fagalde Lick holidays without children

Most childless women fear being alone in old age. Yes, sure, many tell me they have good friends or siblings who will care for them, but it’s not the same as having grown children who feel some obligation to you.

Driving by my neighbors’ house yesterday, I saw their son putting up their Christmas lights. Oh, how I envied them. This year my husband is gone, and I’m not even sure I can get the lights down from their high perch at the top of the garage. At least not without falling off the ladder or dropping the boxes so hard everything inside breaks.

Whom do I call for help? Yes, I have friends, busy friends who work all the time, elderly friends with physical limitations, and grandmother friends who leave town to spend the holidays with their families. I have a brother who always welcomes me to his home, but he lives too far away.

This Thanksgiving, my first year without my husband, I spent the afternoon with friends. We had a wonderful time full of good food, music, and laughter. Then I came home to an empty house. And I cried.

Women become widows whether they have children or not. Most of us choose men who are older than we are. At some point we lose them and end up alone. But if we have children, we can hope for a telephone call or a knock at the door. We can envision a younger person who looks like us wrapping us in a big hug and filling our homes with life.

Childless women without husbands or partners are holiday orphans. That’s what my yoga teacher called the singles she invited to her dinner. Yes, I was invited, too. In fact, I had several invitations to spend the day with other people’s families. Poor Sue must not be alone. But it was not the same.

How was your Thanksgiving experience without children? And how will your childless state affect your Christmas? It’s okay to whine, like me. You’ll never find a more sympathetic audience.

Thank you for being here

Sue Fagalde Lick Chico and Annie, gratitude, holidays without children, Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving. I’m not about to say I’m thankful I don’t have children. I’m not. I wish with all my heart I had children and grandchildren to spend the holidays with, especially because this will be my first Thanksgiving in 25 years without my husband Fred. He will spend the day like any other day at Timberwood Court Memory Care Center, a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients.

I feared I would be alone, but I have lost count of the number of people who have invited me to spend the day with them. I have a lot of good friends, and for that I am grateful. Perhaps this is a day to put away thoughts of who we don’t have and appreciate the people we do have. Tomorrow, thank someone for being in your life.

I am also thankful for my dogs. I am glad that I still have both of them, even though Chico the fence-jumper keeps running away. So far, he always comes back. He and Annie are giant dogs who sit in my lap, lean against my legs, and lick my face when I cry.

I’m thankful for my house, my health and work that I love. I’m thankful for little things like poppyseed muffins and Red Zinger tea and big things like sunshine and having the ocean nearby.

I’m very thankful that someone else is cooking the turkey tomorrow.

If you’re feeling particularly childless during the holidays, make a list of things you’re thankful for. They can be as silly as pink shoestrings or as serious as a cancer scare survived. We could all make long lists of complaints, but this week, let’s be grateful for the good stuff.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Words to Ponder

Sue Fagalde Lick 365 Reflections on Marriage, Elizabeth Stone, Theodore Reik

I’d like to share a couple quotes from the book 365 Reflections on Marriage, edited by Eva Shaw (1999, Adams Media Corp.).

“Making the decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Elizabeth Stone.

“Romance fails us and so do friendships, but the relationship of parent and child, less noisy than all others, remains indelible and indestructible, the strongest relationship on earth.” Theodore Reik.

I find these very powerful statements. How do they make you feel when you read them?

I didn’t give them grandchildren

Sue Fagalde Lick guilt, Halloween, no grandchildren

My father has a soft spot for small children. When I called him after Halloween, he told me about a little girl he described as really cute with “a little skirt and blouse.” I don’t know what kind of costume that was, but that wasn’t the point anyway. Unlike all the other kids who grabbed their candy and hurried to the next house, this child walked right past him into the living room and sat down. Dad, who doesn’t laugh much, chuckled at the memory. She just made herself at home until her father forced her to come out. However, that wasn’t the end. She snuck into the house one more time. Dad thought that was the cutest thing. I teased that she wanted to become his new roommate.

It was a sweet story, but it brought home to me again how I could have made a visit from a little girl or boy a regular thing. If I had had children, I would never have moved to Oregon. I couldn’t break up the family that way. Instead, I imagine I would have brought them to my parents’ house often. Certainly I would have brought them over to show off their Halloween costumes. My mother and father would have loved it. Now I remember my niece, Susan, on my mother’s lap. It was the most beautiful picture. I also remember my dad and grandpa taking my brother and my nephew William fishing. I can picture that line of Fagalde men lined up along the shore. Unfortunately my brother lives far away, so my folks didn’t see his kids much when they were young, but they did have those moments.

By being this lone writer with no children, only dogs, I not only deprived my parents of the joy of grandparenting; I missed the pleasure of seeing my kids and their grandparents love each other.

For people who never wanted children and didn’t feel that close to their parents, I suppose this is not an issue, but for me, it’s one of many little hurts that will never completely go away.

Here we go again

Sue Fagalde Lick Halloween without children, only one without kids

I was sitting at dinner with three other women all talking about writing. Soon they were comparing numbers of children. One had four, one had three, one had two. I have dogs. In the context of the conversation, I felt lucky to have more time to write and freedom to travel. With my husband in a nursing home, I don’t need to rush home anymore. But once again I felt left out of a very important part of life. I also felt it more important than ever to write about what it’s like to be childless, especially in a situation where if I had chosen a different man, I could have been a mom. I have to live with that fact forever, and I have to live with those moments where I’m the only one without children.

On Halloween, I played piano for the 5:30 p.m. Mass. Attendance was light. It never occurred to me until someone mentioned it afterward that folks would be busy escorting their trick-or-treaters around the neighborhood. I have never had to costume a child and worry about whether he would be Spiderman or a pirate or some critter I don’t even know about because I’m not up on kid culture. After Mass, I went to a grownup party with grownup drinks and no kids, just dogs. Sometimes it feels as if children exist in an alternate universe.

Know what I mean?

Here’s an author who gets it

Sue Fagalde Lick books about childlessness, Enza Gandolfo, Swimming

Readers have complained, as I have, that most novels about childless women end happily but unrealistically with a surprise pregnancy or adoption. They don’t show what it’s like when the dream of motherhood never comes true. I will admit straight out that the author sent this book to me in the hope I would include it on my site. If it didn’t work for me, I wouldn’t include it, free book or not. It does, so here it is. Note that the publisher is in Australia, so finding a copy may take some hunting.

Swimming by Enza Gandolfo
Vanark Press, Victoria, Australia, 2009

Kate didn’t think she wanted children, but in her 30s, she changed her mind. Her husband Tom, a sculptor, didn’t care much for kids but was willing to go along to make her happy. Unfortunately, her body didn’t cooperate. After four miscarriages, as she moved into perimenopause, she gave up trying.

This is one of the few novels I have read that deals realistically with the pain of childlessness. Childless readers will recognize the obnoxious questions people ask and the left-out feeling as one’s friends devote themselves to their children. Kate also suffers through a divorce and struggles to find her place in the world. If she is not a mother, what is her role?

The novel has two main threads, Kate as she is now and the novel she is supposedly writing about the child she might have had. The latter tells us the story of her life, and I honestly disliked the breaks where she dithered over her writing project, but the stories come together in the end, and it did turn out to be a very engaging novel with characters so true I halfway expect to meet them on the street.

This book grew out of Gandolfo’s PhD thesis. A lecturer in Professional Writing at the School of Communication and the Arts at Victoria University, Gandolfo lives in Melbourne.

A lego in the dirt

Sue Fagalde Lick childless house, Legos, toys

I found a red Lego toy piece in the yard yesterday. It’s a small plastic rectangle, its holes crusted with dirt. Where did it come from? My life with Fred has never included Legos, although I have played with them in doctors’ waiting rooms and other people’s houses. I have always liked toys with which you could build things. But how did a Lego get here? We haven’t even had any young children visit us in the 11 years Fred and I have owned this house. Our house is surrounded by trees, no other house close enough for toys to wander our way.

The only answer is that the dogs dug up a piece of history from the family that lived here before, the Fends. They had four children, two sons and two daughters. Big pictures of them hung on the living room walls. Their oldest daughter was living on her own. The younger daughter, high school age, had cerebral palsy. We met her crawling from her bedroom into the hallway the day we took our second look at the house.

The room I use as my office belonged to the boys, who slept in bunk beds and left color crayon marks on the walls. While the older boy worked at his computer, the younger boy showed me his craft projects sitting on the windowsill. Now the walls have been repainted, the windows replaced, and the closet turned into a file room. My desk, shelves and writing paraphernalia fill the room where the boys used to sleep.

The Fends fell on hard times and had to leave the house that was probably the only home their children had known. Now it is a home where all signs of children have been erased. Souvenirs from our travels and our collections of ruby glass and shot glasses decorate the living room and den. It is definitely not a childproof house. But why bother? Children don’t come here.

I don’t want to throw the Lego piece away. It’s as if I have found one piece, and now I need to find the puzzle to which it belongs. I think that’s how it always is with childless women. Something is missing. We’ve got one lost Lego and we don’t know what to do with it.

Dog motherhood is tough

Sue Fagalde Lick Chico and Annie, dog babies, sprained wrist

I’m typing this with a sprained wrist. The other day the dogs and I had a disagreement and I wound up flying through the air straight at the back wall of the house. I hit with my right hand, right knee and the left side of my glasses. This isn’t the first time the dogs have caused me to fall. I can remember sitting on the beach a few months ago wondering if I’d ever get up after little (70-pound) Chico got scared by the waves coming at him. I had some major bruises, but I walked away. This time I got a trip to the ER, a splint, an enforced vacation from my music and a major slowdown in my writing. I am not supposed to be typing, but this hurts a lot less than doing dishes.

Anyway, Chico and Annie, 19-month-old lab-bull terrier siblings, have never and would never attack me. They’re just big, and they play rough. Sometimes they’re stubborn. Many of my friends, my father, my pastor and others are recommending that I get rid of the dogs. Only one friend, who is childless by marriage like me, insists that I can’t possibly get rid of my babies. They are my babies, having arrived in my arms at 8 weeks old, when they were 8 and 9 pounds. I have certainly considered looking for a family to love them. They are good with other people, including children, but a little scary with other dogs. Still they are the only company I have in this house these days, and the quiet would be unbearable. Right now they are sleeping in the living room, but any minute, Chico or Annie could come into my office and lay a warm nose in my lap. I would miss that.

These being the only “babies,” I’ll ever have, I feel an obligation to care for them as long as I can. Maybe I can’t keep them forever, but I intend to try. I’m still training them. They have already learned so much. They knock me down, but they also make me laugh and give me someone to hug when I need it. And these days, with no kids and my husband in a nursing home, I need it.