Separation Anxiety - Laura Zigman Page 0,2

When school starts again right after Labor Day, I drive Teddy in the morning, then come home and pace, avoiding the stacks of bills and my work. But I can’t ignore the dog. I eye her, asleep peacefully on the floor—and try to resist—really, I do—I have a second cup of coffee, check my email and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram accounts twenty more times, knock out a few rounds of Words with Friends, try to block out the awful things the government is now doing daily. But I always give in, defeated. There is no fighting the need to take comfort in whatever form is available. I walk slowly across the house to the bedroom, kneel down in front of the white IKEA bureau that had caused Gary and me to fight so bitterly years earlier while putting it together—Gary had actually accused me of “withholding directions” to its assembly, as if I wouldn’t have done anything to cut our agony by even a nanosecond if I could have, not prolong it—and open the drawer that had once been just for sweaters I never wear anymore. The mere act of reaching blindly for the sling behind all my moth-eaten cashmere always brings instant relief.

Sure, I feel like a perv when I slip the sling over my head and stalk the dog around the room—catching her in a position where she can be picked up quickly and smoothly, like a weight lifter’s clean-and-jerk lift, before rolling over on her back, thinking it’s some kind of bonus playtime, is always a challenge. Especially when it takes three or four times before I can grab her in a surprise attack and maneuver her inside, always getting dog hair in my mouth and enduring a moment when I fear I might drop her or fall over before finding the sweet spot of the heavy sling on my lower stomach and hip.

Charlotte isn’t light—twenty pounds on a good day—and she is unwieldy sometimes, like when she wants to get out for no reason other than the fact that she’s a normal dog who just wants to be free and her paws scratch against the fabric, even though I always make sure she can see and breathe just fine in there. I usually throw in one of those disgusting dried bull penises sold in pet stores as a chew snack—a bully stick—as a bribe. I know it’s not fair for the dog to endure my obsession without there being something in it for her, too, so I always have plenty of treats on hand to get her in the sling and keep things fun.

It doesn’t take long for the dog to like it. To look forward to it. I know that might sound like wishful thinking or projection on my part, but who’s to say that even if I am projecting that the dog doesn’t actually like it in there? The two ideas aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I might be floridly demented in thinking the dog likes being carried around in a giant diaper, but the dog might really like it in there. Because seriously, what’s not to like? It’s warm, there are snacks, and for a few hours every day she doesn’t have to walk or sniff or chase or make any decisions of her own. It’s like a vacation, a stress-free state of suspended animation that I sometimes wish I could replicate for myself.

Those hours when the dog is in the sling are restorative for me. Like a new drug, it’s helping me taper off an old one, overlapping and masking the side effects of withdrawal. By which I mean, wearing Charlotte is helping me get through the end of Teddy’s childhood. By which I mean, instead of turning to my husband with that overwhelming sadness and longing, I’ve turned to our dog.

No wonder we’re separated.

Well/er

I wear the dog around the house while I do my “content-generating” work, writing short engagingly shallow online posts for Well/er, a health and happiness website run by a small local startup with national aspirations whose management team has a median dude-age of twenty-four. Well/er believes in tiny incremental gains in physical and emotional wellness (hence Well/er, not Well), instead of big ambitious ones: DOING JUST ENOUGH IS ENOUGH TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE is the website’s actual tagline. As a fundamentally lazy person myself, I can’t say I disagree: sometimes less is more.

There’s a bank of article ideas and suggested due dates on the content-management system (CMS), as