Regrets

I just finished reading about Lawdog's loss of his Moira.

It reinforced what hit me yesterday, about my own loss with Selkie. I was mainly beating myself up over the fact that after I moved out of my parent's house, I never took her to live with me. We rationalized it by saying she would be better off if she stayed with my parents because of the other dog, Maxine, would get too lonely. We took Emmett, my Sheltie, and he lived just fine in our apartment, until a couple of years ago when one of our other dogs attacked him. We decided to send him back to live with my mom, to keep him safe from our other male. Not long after that we had to put Sirius, the other male, down, because he was attacking our females too. That broke our hearts, but it was the best thing we could do. We see Emmett often enough since my mom lives here in town. Since my parents divorced the same year me and Phoenix got married, my dad moved a little north and took Selkie and Maxine with him. We'd go to visit him and the dogs, but sometimes the pain of leaving Selkie each time was too much and I'd start crying on the drive home. I never did bring her to live with us... sure, she'd stay a night or two if I asked, but she always went back to my dad. Then she got really sick and we had to put her down two years ago this July. I think what triggered it was getting the new kennel to keep the puppies in. They were tearing up the folding kennel, so I bought a sturdier new one, that is just like the other non-folding one, except it's blue instead of tan. The other one I had bought when Selkie was a pup, and this new one listed appropriate breeds, including "Australian Cattle Dog", which is half of Selkie's mix, the other being German Shorthaired Pointer. It just triggered a bunch of thinking about Selkie, leading to me regretting a bunch not bringing her to live with me once we started getting more than one dog in our place. Emmett helped me find Sydney one day; then one friend found Rosa but couldn't keep her; Teddy came to us from the couple who lived next to Phoenix's grandparents' house, when they couldn't take him with them when they moved back to Chicago; Stella just wandered up one weekend and stayed, despite our efforts to find her proper owner; and now we found two Black Lab pups on the street corner in front of our house last month. All these dogs, and I couldn't find room back when my Selkie was still alive. No wonder why I feel angry at myself for it. I'm trying to figure out what lessons I should be learning from this, beyond "Play with your dogs more NOW."