Creature Comforts

Guest post by Karen Pedersen Travis

Creature Comforts

As the oldest of three kids, I loved being a big sister. So, when I had a child of my own, I always planned to have another. But life rarely goes according to plan. When I became a single mom with an only child, I knew I had to get it right. I only had this one chance—there were no do-overs. The pressure was on. And my baby wanted a baby.

“When can we get a baby?” my daughter asked from her car seat when she was three.

“We can’t just ‘get’ a baby, honey.”

“Yes, we can,” she said as we passed by the hospital. “They have them right there.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said, catching a glimpse of her in the rear-view mirror.
Barely more than a baby herself. It was clearly time for another talk about the birds and the bees.

My baby wanted a baby. What’s a single mother to do? Maybe, just maybe, it was time to get a puppy.

Our 14-year-old German Shorthair Pointer had just passed away and our house was
empty without her. My daughter tried filling the void with other animals. She named the worms in our backyard. She collected frog eggs in glass jars, hoping they would hatch. She even picked up a garter snake on our walk, holding it up to show me how “cute” it was as it wrapped itself around her arm.

“Can we keep it?” she pleaded.

“Nope.” No way.

That’s when I decided we would get a puppy. Not just any puppy, I thought to myself,
but one that looked and acted exactly like the quiet, calm, older dog we’d just lost.
Once again, things didn’t go according to plan.

Zippy was an adorable pup. She looked like a mini-me to our lost pet—a graceful,
green-eyed, long-legged canine that could go from zero to 60 in three seconds flat. But, unlike her predecessor, Zippy was rambunctious—prone to scratching, barking and running away.

As she grew bigger, I grew increasingly overwhelmed. When she wasn’t knocking us
over with sheer enthusiasm, she was jogging in place on a leash, longing to run. I realized I wasn’t being fair to the dog. After finding a hunter who was eager to take her, we found ourselves once again without a pet.

Eventually, guilt got the better of me. I tried filling the void with a hamster, but it simply wasn’t the same. My baby still wanted a baby. And my mother, who loved being a grandmother more than anything in the world, wanted her to have one, too.
Once my mother decided to do something, there was little anyone could do to stop her—especially when it comes to pets. Growing up, we always had a menagerie of animals underfoot.

If she wanted us to get a dog, I knew that sooner or later she would talk me into getting one. But I didn’t want to fail. Again. So, I proceeded with caution.

In the meantime, my mother was on the hunt for a puppy for herself. When she found the “perfect litter,” she convinced my daughter and me to “come have a look.”
As anyone who has ever gone to “look” at a litter of puppies knows, the experience never stops there.

“These are the best dogs,” my mother said. “They never get bigger than eight pounds.”

A perpetual puppy, I pondered. Interesting. Go on...

“And here’s the best part: They never, ever bark!” This from the woman who taught me that, when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Nonetheless, we adopted a small, white, fluffy, barking little furball named Skippy. My baby finally had her baby, and he served us well for nearly 15 years.

Fast forward twenty years and the tables are turned. Scrolling through social media, I see pictures of friends with grandbabies perched in highchairs wielding spoons like swords. Toddlers trotting across the kitchen floor, their little buts wiggling in thick, diaper-padded pants. Cheeky smiles of kids in car seats on their way to pumpkin patches. Adorable.

My little girl is an adult now. She and her fiancé just bought a house. And she is not yet ready to have kids. So, what’s a grandmother-in-waiting to do?

Enter Vivi, my beautiful, black-haired, green-eyed, crumpled receipt fetching grand kitty.

“Hi mom. We’re going out of town,” my daughter texts. “Can you check on Vivi?”
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“Yes!” I write back, eager for kitty-cuddles. I can work with that.

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Karen Pedersen Travis is a retired communication consultant, a mom, and emerging writer. She received a bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and now writes creative nonfiction from her home in Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and two aggressively loving golden retrievers. She is currently working on her first, full-length book about her experiences growing up in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, where her parents worked as Lutheran missionaries.