Cricket has been having trouble jumping up on the beds recently, but instead of resting on the floor or calmly asking for help (Butterfly used to snuffle at my hand to ask for uppies), Cricket shrieks endlessly. It’s not just barking, it’s at the top of her vocal range, where glass really should be shattering all around her.
She takes CBD oil to manage the regular pains of aging, and DES for her previous incontinence issues, which have both helped her tremendously, but they haven’t stopped the aging process altogether. She’s thin, and she has to wear sweaters because she’s lost a lot of hair, and her vision is blurry and her hearing is, let’s say, imaginative. But she is still the complicated, demanding diva she always has been. So when she started to struggle more to get herself up onto Grandma’s bed, after her middle of the night visit to the wee wee pad, she would stand next to Grandma’s bed at three or four or five in the morning and bark her head off, demanding to be lifted back up onto the bed.
Mom’s answer was to cover her head with a blanket and try to ignore the noise, because that’s how she’s managed Cricket’s long-time habit of trying to bark her awake in the mornings, but I could not ignore the noise. After I’d been woken up two or three nights in a row to lift Cricket back up onto “her” bed, I insisted that we give the old doggy steps a try.
We bought the doggy steps for Butterfly, way back when, because her legs were too short for jumping onto and off of the beds. She was eight years old and fresh from her last pregnancy at a puppy mill when we first brought her home, and she had heart problems and diabetes and lumps and bumps and broken teeth, so I wanted her to have the best life possible in the years she had left, and I thought the doggy steps would help. I also assumed she’d just know how to use them, magically, but it took weeks of training, and each step required a new chicken treat. Cricket’s contribution to training was that she would try to steal the chicken treats before Butterfly could reach them, though she used every possible machination to get to the treats without ever putting a paw on those doggy steps. By the end of training, Butterfly was only okay with walking down the steps, and not up, but at least it gave her a little more independence. Cricket, on the other hand, continued to treat the steps like hot lava to be avoided at all costs.
So it made sense that Mom was skeptical about Cricket being willing to use the steps now, at almost sixteen years old. And my first attempt was a predictable disaster. I put the doggy steps at the end of my bed, while both dogs were napping, and when they woke up to the smell of whatever Grandma was having for lunch, they acted as if a scary dragon had arrived to stop them from reaching the floor and they maneuvered so far around the steps that they slammed into the dresser when they jumped off the bed.
But I wasn’t willing to give up. I thought, maybe the problem was that Cricket’s desperate need was to be on her grandma’s bed, not mine. So I put the doggy steps at the end of Mom’s bed, and the next time Cricket wanted to go up, instead of lifting her straight onto the bed, I lifted her onto each step, one at a time, making sure all of her feet made contact, until she reached the top and walked off onto the bed. And then I did it again, and again. And then Mom, still skeptical, put a chicken treat up at the top of the steps, and showed it to Cricket, and Cricket walked up the steps on her own. And ever since then, Cricket walks up those steps whenever she wants to, even when Grandma isn’t on the bed to welcome her. There was almost no learning curve at all.
And I realized, once again, that with Cricket motivation is everything. And I think I might be more like Cricket than I realized. I don’t try to be stubborn or be a lot of trouble, but when my anxiety is high and there are no rewards big enough to overcome it, I can’t learn anything. I can just shake, or cry, or shout for help. I don’t mean to be like this. In fact, I’ve done everything I know to fix it. But nothing really works, until it works. Once the anxiety recedes enough, and the motivation is strong enough, suddenly things that seemed impossible become possible. But I never know when that turning point will be reached. So, like Cricket, I stand right outside of the Promised Land, wailing, begging for entrance, sometimes not even knowing who I’m crying to, waiting for the steps forward to finally become clear.
I hope that when my doggy steps, or the equivalent, finally appear, I will be able to learn how to use them as quickly as Cricket has. She is, as always, my best teacher.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 