Stepdog

by Mireya Navarro

  This was the raw material I had to work with. But I was inspired by a story I wrote for the Times about the competitive world of canine freestyle dancing. Dogs can be trained not so much to dance as to weave, back up, turn around, and go through their owner’s legs to the beat of music.

  “It’s more like modern dance than ballroom dancing,” one dancing-dog owner explained. “It’s interpretative dance to music.”

  I wasn’t that impressed when I finally saw some of the dancing dogs in action. They went in and out of their owner’s legs, they jumped on hind legs, but it was not dancing. It was boring until one owner told me freestyle had helped tame her misbehaving dog.

  “They learn to focus on their owners rather than to have their own agenda,” she said.

  Eddie certainly had an agenda. But he did not even fetch, so dancing would have been like Princeton to a tot.

  But if dogs could dance, our Eddie could surely heel, shake, and roll over. He was already so good at sitting.

  “Shake!” I commanded one Saturday when he and I were home alone.

  I grabbed his left front paw and showed him. Then I fed him a biscuit. “Good boy.” He learned that trick pretty fast once he realized treats awaited. The results were so encouraging, so easy, that we soon moved on to rolling over.

  “Sit!”

  “Good boy.”

  “Down! Get down!”

  This one seemed a little tougher. Eddie became confused and gave me his paw to shake.

  “No. Down!” I pushed his body down and he finally let go.

  “Roll over!”

  I had to do that for him too as he went limp. What did this dog weigh? Forty-five pounds? Heavy. It was like trying to shove a dresser.

  It took a few days of repetitive work, but he finally got it, sort of. Now when I commanded “Sit!” he flopped down and rolled over in one quick motion to get his biscuit sooner.

  When I thought he was more or less ready, I promised Jim and the kids a surprise one evening after dinner. They gathered around and Eddie performed flawlessly to much wowing and laughter.

  I was proud of him and proud of myself.

  “See?” I told Jim telepathically. “It didn’t kill the dog to experience some discipline.”

  I ambitiously turned from the power of the biscuit to Cesar Millan, whose show I discovered accidentally while flipping TV channels. Dog Whisperer was a hoot and I loved Millan’s no-nonsense approach. You’re the boss, the leader of the pack, and the dog must follow, not the other way around.

  “If you don’t become your dog’s pack leader, he will assume that role and try to dominate you,” he warned in his book Cesar’s Way.

  The antidote for a dog with issues, he advised, was exercise, discipline, and affection, “in that order!”

  Sí!

  I could do at least two of three. After all the touchy-feely advice from stepfamily expert books, I welcomed Millan’s straightforward orders.

  During our walks, Eddie usually strained at the leash as if he just got past airport security and his plane was about to leave. He wanted to smell the leaves, or charge another dog, or chase a squirrel. I now started to tug back to get him to heel and not walk in front of me anymore.

  “Heel, Eddie!”

  He seemed surprised at the change in our routine and kept pulling, throwing his weight to one side and making choking sounds. So annoying. But I persisted with Millan’s way, trying to give off “calm-assertive” energy that just cried out “leader.”

  When that didn’t work, I yelled.

  “From now on, you heel! Heel! Heel!”

  Eddie did not like it but he had no choice. I tugged hard whenever he yanked forward.

  I next tried to yank Jim’s collar. We needed to present a united front with Eddie too. But Jim just laughed when I explained the training and asked him to reinforce it when he took Eddie out.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  I was not amused. “I’m serious, Jim.”

  “He’s like most dogs,” he said, “so excited when you put him on a leash, he’s constantly pulling you. It’s what most young dogs do.”

  “So you don’t want to even try it.”

  “No. This is going to be a futile and time-consuming effort and accomplish nothing.”

  “So you won’t want to work with me?”

  “This is not about you, darling. I’m just trying to do the sensible thing. I’ve never cared to put that much time and attention to the dog. I’m not into all this training stuff. I just kind of let him be a dog. That’s good enough for me.”

  “But this goes hand in hand with other types of behavior. He still sits on sofas, he still tries to sneak into our bedroom. This is supposed to nurture the idea that there are things he cannot do.”

  “I just want him to be a happy guy and a good companion.”

  Jim just didn’t want to upset Eddie. Every so often I’d go through our tricks so Eddie wouldn’t forget them, hiding the biscuit behind my back until he performed the shake–roll-over bit more or less perfectly. My husband acted as if I were lashing his dog like a lion tamer. “He’s waiting for the biscuit, darling,” he said with a sour smile as he watched me one morning rehearsing Eddie a few times without rewarding him.

  I prodded Eddie to roll over on the hardwood floor of the kitchen, but he balked. He just refused. I didn’t know why I even bothered. My teaching Eddie tricks had not brought us any closer. He still pestered me. He still did whatever he felt like.

  “He won’t roll over on the hardwood floor,” Jim urged me. “Do it on the carpet.”

  “Who’s the trainer?” I said, giving up.

  I had more important concerns. We had a dinner party coming up on Saturday and we needed to figure out what to do about the dog. California’s energy czar was among a group of ten friends we had invited for a grilled salmon dinner. We had met the state energy official at another friend’s a few weeks before and it had not gone that well. That friend, Tom, held salon-type lunches on Saturdays and I found myself sitting next to the energy czar as a joint made its way to me. I had a decision to make—pass it on to the state official or send it on its journey back to the potheads who thought it was a good idea to light up. I chose the latter, but both czar and I were silently mortified.

  The night of our dinner party there was no pot, only Eddie to worry about. We usually crated him during parties and Eddie was fine with it, but a friend would sooner or later ask “Where’s Eddie?” and then spring him free. I didn’t like it because it reminded me of what a former ambassador to Belize once told me she did at her parties—she would set her dogs loose to let guests know it was time to go home. Not exactly diplomatic. I didn’t want anyone at my parties to get the idea we were throwing them out. But Eddie always had a Che Guevara in our crowd eager to liberate him.

  “Let’s crate him before the guests show up,” I told Jim. “Not everyone is a dog lover, and the energy czar mentioned to you that he’s afraid of dogs, remember? I don’t want Eddie under the table vacuuming crumbs and trying to lick hands during dinner anyway.”

  “Sure, of course.”

  The night of the party, as we set out hors d’oeuvres in the backyard and showtime approached, I told Jim, “Let’s crate Eddie now.”

  “We can do it when we sit down to dinner,” Jim said. “We’ll be in the backyard for cocktails and he’ll just be busy running around.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea if the guy is afraid of dogs.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  The czar was Jim’s guest, not mine, so I backed off.

  Our guests arrived and we gathered outside with cocktails in hand. The state official sat at our oval-shaped glass table on the patio with a few other friends. I was in the kitchen preparing trays in between sips of a martini when I looked over and saw Eddie jump on the czar, trying t
o get to a morsel of Manchego cheese.

  “Eddie! Jim!” I screamed, spilling half of my drink on the floor.

  Jim ran over to the table still holding his glass of scotch and peeled his beast off the petrified man. That’s when he crated Eddie.

  I was beyond upset. This was also the day I first noticed floaters in my eyes.

  It may have been all an overreaction (on the energy czar’s part too), but I had had it with Jim’s leniency. The Latina in me couldn’t bear the thought of making a guest uncomfortable. The sense of hospitality captured in the phrase “Mi casa es su casa” was ingrained. The energy czar never recovered. Even after Eddie was safely crated away, the poor guy ate looking over his shoulder.

  That night, I conflated kids and dog and troubled marriage and felt furious at my husband. It was obvious that Jim, whether consciously or subconsciously, was not ready for a co–head of household, or, yes, let’s go there, even marriage. He may have adored me, but he had me pegged. I felt he encouraged my efforts to put my stamp on the blended family and then sabotaged me. Now I was upset even at parties.

  There was really no point in any further delay.

  We—I—needed help.

  Eight

  Stepparenting 101: The Fun House

  Right now I’m locked away in my room, bawling my eyes out . . . again. Part of me knows I shouldn’t be this upset. There’s no one who understands, who can help talk me down, so I spiral through rage and grief.”

  Thank God that was not me. This particular horror story was from a member of my Yahoo! support group. My own troubles seemed trivial next to the stepmom in the middle of her husband’s nasty custody battle, or the one with the drug-addicted stepson, or the one raising four stepkids who didn’t get a Mother’s Day card, or the one whose husband ignored her when his kids were around. Boy, could these stepmoms vent. I took solace in that at least I wasn’t going through that. But I could relate. In fact, I was a cliché. A few hours online and it was obvious many stepmoms shared uncannily similar experiences. Feeling isolated. Check. Doubting yourself. Check. Feeling resentful, jealous, inadequate—check, check, check. We all felt like we woke up one day in the wrong reality show. No matter how much in love we were, it wasn’t just about the love relationship.

  Already years since the wedding, the family blending was still a problem. My constant reminder was the dog resting flat on the floor right now, following my movements in the kitchen like a crocodile tracking his prey. His thoughts came through clearly.

  “She eats with my guy, she sleeps with my guy, she gets my guy’s attention. I’ll harass her until she hightails it out of here.”

  Suck it up, dog.

  What did I think my life as a stepmom would be like? In my fantasy, I envisioned us gathering at the end of the day, all of us asking, “How was your day?” The kids would tell me they didn’t like their teachers, and I would tell them about the nun who spanked me in first grade for talking in the line for the bathroom, making them realize they didn’t have it so bad. I envisioned myself as their confidante, the one they’d come to when they were angry with their parents. I’d be funny and silly, they’d laugh at my jokes. I’d be a mentor, a role model, a positive influence, the voice of reason in their emotionally charged lives, a friend. I envisioned hugging my way through the rough patches. I envisioned having a family (with no dog but perhaps a rabbit).

  Back to earth, I realized I had been overexposed to Hollywood endings. The advice from real-life stepmoms was brutal.

  “Get your armor on,” one Yahoo! stepmom wrote. “It’s a painful road.”

  “Behave like a potted plant,” another one said. In other words: Zip it up.

  “Have a time-out room for yourself, complete with a lock.”

  “Get out.”

  That last bit was the reaction to a stepmom who wrote that she had left her life in California to move to Florida for marriage. The BM, or biological mom in stepmom jargon, was “a control freak” who for the past two years had tried to alienate her eight-year-old daughter from the father. The stepmom felt she was “a dumping ground for both the mom and the daughter’s anger about this divorce.” The stepmom now struggled with feelings of depression. “I feel like I am in the twilight zone,” she wrote.

  But after all that, she was staying put.

  “I gained an amazing man,” she explained.

  You could feel the collective head nods through the computer. That was the irony. When our husbands showed their commitment to their families, their big hearts, it made us love these amazing men more, even if the maddening family goings-on took us straight to vodka martinis (shaken, please).

  The consensus, I learned a bit late, was that it was best to enter a stepchild’s life before the age of ten or after the age of fifteen, to avoid the terrifying terrain known as puberty. I had perversely come in past the Chuck E. Cheese’s birthday party stage and just in time for the door-slamming phase. So much for my investigative reporting skills. With the kids already in high school, I was still a pinball in the household—one still hoping to land in just the right place.

  I had tried books and the patience of friends seeking advice. After the mishap involving one energy czar, I’d also turned to online support groups. I voraciously read my Yahoo! e-mails late at night for nuggets of wisdom. Much of the information from my stepmom sisterhood alarmed me, but there was a lot that gave me comfort and hope too. Many stepmoms wrote to say “Hang in there!” or “It’s all worth it.” There were happy endings. Some were generous with ideas for coping in the meantime.

  “Find a way to exercise at least three times a week.”

  “Take time for yourself—take night classes, craft classes, book groups, or just sit in a bookstore coffee shop and read.”

  “Don’t forgo happy hours after work and shopping and weekend trips with your girlfriends.”

  I revved up my social calendar and became a health nut. I drove forty-five minutes in traffic to a Zumba class. I started my mornings twice a week with Pilates. I found a place with forty-dollar-an-hour massages. I breathed and om’ed for dear life. When a literary agent spotted a Sunday Styles story I wrote on environmentally sensitive weddings, she encouraged me to write a book and I eagerly took on what eventually became Green Wedding: Planning Your Eco-friendly Celebration. Jim, an author himself (he wrote Burning Down the House, a book about the fall of E. F Hutton), cheered me on. Book writing took over more and more of my weekends and free time. On weekdays, I immersed myself deeper into my work at the Times.

  The distractions and work helped, but my beloved husband and I still needed to achieve a workable home life. Suffice it to say that after several years of marriage, I was still not one of the peeps. I hadn’t gotten much beyond the hi-and-bye stage with the kids as they came and went in the endless shuttling between their mom and pop worlds. I helped the kids pick presents for their father. I cooked chicken wings, enchiladas, and other fun dishes for them (even prompting a friend of Henry’s to tell him midway through ecstatic gorging: “You’re so lucky!”). I went to movies and shared dinners with them. But I barely scratched the surface of involvement. There were many lines I felt I couldn’t cross in order to avoid ripples of conflict. Sometimes I felt like I lived with strangers.

  I loved my husband more than ever as I lived a double life—half the week, when Jim and I were alone, we were each the person the other met. The other half, I was sidelined in my own home. I found Jim uncompromising when it came to his children. I looked for more ways to disengage and make myself scarce.

  But there was only so much escaping I could do. Jim and I agreed we needed to see a therapist. For me, to go to a shrink required outgrowing some cultural apprehensions. The conventional wisdom when I was growing up was that only crazy people needed one. I had never felt the need to pay someone to listen to my problems, even in therapy-happy New York. I had plenty of girlfriends for that. But at some p
oint I realized what an imposition that was, how boring I sounded, and I started holding back. A professional would offer a safe, neutral space to let it rip. I was overcoming my misgivings. There was no way around the need for someone to help us bridge our differences. All the experts seemed to agree that the job of blending a family was often too big for just two people. Making the emotional mechanics of two grown-ups jibe in these tense situations required distance and knowledge. Some experts didn’t even like the word “blend,” calling the term misleading. People were not ingredients that could be poured together in this vessel known as marriage and blended into a mix, they warned. Children, particularly, kept their old connections and loyalties. They’d always have two families, not just the one, no matter how much blending may be attempted.

  And need I say Eddie was just another difficult personality in the household, another riptide trying to crash my marriage onto the rocks? I exaggerate, but he certainly was not helping. He added to the tensions, the bad energy. Sometimes I came home from work and found husband, kids, and dog all snuggled up watching a movie on the couch. The dog looked the smuggest of them all, at least until a doorbell rang on TV and he whizzed past me like a bullet to greet no one at our front door.

  Nitwit.

  • • •

  I was aware that Eddie brought out the worst in me, and I tried to be the adult Homo sapiens. But on bad days, I begrudged him his simple, coddled life—not a care in the world, lots of scratching behind the ears, free food, sweet nothings, and fresh air. Few things gave me more pleasure at times than to sit on Jim’s lap and smooch with him—while I watched Spots go berserk. Sometimes, if Eddie was in the backyard sunning himself, I purposely made a racket as I stomped up the steps to Jim’s office. Within seconds I’d hear Eddie scrambling to get up, get inside, and catch up to me so he could beat me to the prize, whimpering all the way from sunny backyard to den. If I timed it right, he reached me just as I shut the door in his spotted face. I was trying to induce a canine heart attack, if there was such a thing.