My Gentle Barn (6 page)

For the first couple of years, almost all of the funding for Rover Rescue came from my business of walking, training, grooming, and boarding dogs. I also charged an adoption fee when a new family took in a dog or cat, and that helped cover some of the vet costs. My dad had helped me buy a house a year and a half into my rescuing career when I’d convinced him that to properly run both a business and a nonprofit I had to have a place of my own with a large backyard. It was a beautiful little half-acre in Tarzana, which is part of the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. This corner of the Valley was a crazy quilt of new tract housing with swimming pools and tennis courts, side by side with barns and stables behind old ranch houses, and it was still agriculturally zoned. My place had a small grassy backyard, and beyond that a large dirt barnyard and the original barn. There was a variety of fruit and nut trees as well as fruitless mulberry trees that canvassed the yard in dappled light. The barnyard gave the dogs plenty of room to roam between walks and dog-park runs.

But even with all this space, it was tricky business housing rescues and boarders on one property. To make sure all the animals stayed healthy, I had to keep newly rescued dogs or cats in quarantine in one of the bedrooms until the vet had cleared them of infectious disease. Rescued pregnant dogs were given a room to themselves to give birth and nurse their pups. Litters with parvo had yet another room. And all the animals had to be inside for the night—which meant that even my own bedroom was brimming with dogs and cats.

This was the environment I lived in when I met Scott at the dog park.

I had just gotten all the dogs into my truck after a good romp in the park, and I noticed two big dogs in the back of a Jeep parked next to me. They were staring at me in the most intense way, and I felt a deep pull to go say hello to them. As I was petting them, the driver hopped out and watched me for a moment.

“They’re beautiful,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “They’re a Lab-ridgeback mix.” Then he stuck out his hand. “I’m Scott.”

After that we saw each other often at the dog park and talked while our dogs sped around the grounds, kicking up wood chips and vying for tennis balls.

Finally one day he asked me out to dinner.

“Sorry,” I said. “Thank you, but I’ve got a litter of puppies with parvo at home. I can’t leave for longer than a half hour.” I had rescued eight puppies with the dreaded parvovirus—referred to in the dog community as “the P word.” Parvo spreads like wildfire. Although adult dogs have a halfway decent survival rate, when it comes to puppies, more often than not the virus wins. But I’d discovered that if you could keep the puppies hydrated with subcutaneous fluids, they had a better chance of making it. If the litter was large, by the time I finished treating the last of the puppies, I had no more than thirty minutes before I had to start all over again with the first dog.

“Well,” Scott said, “how about if I come over and sit with you while you take care of them?”

This got my attention. A man who was willing to sit in a sick-puppy room while I gave injections? “OK,” I said, “if you want to. Sure.”

I didn’t expect him to stick around long. I worked hard to keep my place clean, jumping up every time a puppy had an accident as well as cleaning the yard and hosing down the patio twice every day. But I knew how most people felt about animals. One or two pets was acceptable, perhaps even quaint. Five, ten, twenty animals was considered an obsession and planted you firmly in the category of freak—eccentric, at best. I had finally allowed animals to take their proper place in the center of my life, where they ruled my schedule and delineated my lifestyle. If that made me eccentric, then so be it. But there were no movies or dinner dates for me.

My tight treatment schedule, together with the practicality of wearing something that could get peed on, didn’t allow for a change out of my fur-covered sweatshirt before Scott showed up. Besides, I figured he would only last an hour, two at most. It never occurred to me that he might stick around solely because he liked who I was. I believed I had to work hard to win a man’s attention; I had to be witty, charming, or at the very least wear a miniskirt. And I didn’t have the time, setting, or frame of mind to do any of these. But at three in the morning, after hours of talking with me, watching me take care of sick puppies, and even holding them while I gave injections, Scott stood on the front porch and said, “That was fun.”

Yeah right
, I thought.
He’s probably thinking, “That was the strangest date I’ve ever had.”

But two days later, he came back for a second round. And this time he asked me to show him how to give the fluid injections. And with that, he pretty much stole my heart.

Within a year, Scott and I were married, and I was amazed at how unflappable he was at the center of the four-legged whirlwind that filled our life. My favorite time of the day was when he’d come home from work and together we’d take all the dogs out for a walk and tell each other about our day. On weekends he’d even help me with the pet adoptions that we held at local pet stores and malls, where we brought the dogs and cats who were healthy and ready for a new home. I felt like the luckiest animal-rescuing woman in the world to have found such a man.

My parents were another story. They didn’t understand why I didn’t give up my activities with animals now that I had a husband to support me. My parents were divorced by this point, but they were a unified front in their opinions about my life. “You’ve got to be more attentive to your husband,” my mom would say. Sometimes my dad would ask why I didn’t just volunteer a couple of days a week instead of having my own nonprofit … now that I was married. Although my parents had come back into my life when I’d gotten off crack, my relationship with them was no less complex than it had always been. I knew they loved me, in their own crazy way, and I’d appreciated their financial support when I’d needed it. But after all these years, they still had no clue who I was or what made me tick. When they gave me advice, it was as though they were talking not to me but to some role they’d been waiting all these years for me to step into. The good, compliant daughter role. The has-none-of-her-own-opinions role. But that was not—and neither could it ever be—me. And I still responded, deep inside, in knee-jerk rebellion to any advice they offered. That said, they were still my parents and I’d still been raised in a rule-laden tradition where children obeyed their elders. What they said mattered a lot more than I wanted it to.

I got that they wanted me to live a normal life and act like a normal person. And it’s not like I’d never wanted that for myself. But I’d pushed animals out of the center of my world and had ended up on
the floor in the corner of a room plotting my own demise. What my parents couldn’t understand was that Rover Rescue was not just some crazy hobby I’d picked up. It was my lifeline. And dropping my lifeline would have grave consequences, not only for me but for everyone in my life. In the end, it didn’t matter how much they thought I should be normal. I needed—for my very survival—not to be.

Until I got pregnant.

The moment I found out a new little life was growing inside me, my awareness pulled inward, and my life force settled down—literally down, as though rooting me to the ground—and all I wanted to do was nest. Just as a mama bird weaves bits of foliage or wool into her nest to make a soft landing for the eggs and insulation for the naked pink hatchlings, I wanted to create a home environment suitable for receiving a vulnerable new life. Having a house overrun with sick and recovering animals did not seem a suitable environment for my baby. My baby would be my new focus, my new sense of purpose, my reason to stick around on the planet and stay clean. I was going to create the most beautiful life for this new human being, and to do that I intended to stay home and enjoy the fact that my husband made a good enough living for me to be a full-time mother.

From this new vantage point, I slowly began to admit to myself that my rescue operation had begun to go just a bit awry. Perhaps the rescuing itself had become sort of an addiction; it had grown more and more difficult for me to adopt the animals out. I knew a long rehabilitation period could result in my getting attached, but I’d begun to get a little too attached even when rehab took only weeks. No matter the length of time, I’d pour my heart into bringing the animals around, convincing them they could trust me. What kind of message was I giving them when I then turned around and abandoned them to someone else? Since my MO always was to rescue animals no one else wanted—sick, mangy, toothless, and terrified—they were not immediately placeable even if I could bring myself to give them up. The result: a growing
pack of dogs in every room of my house and a cat on every chair. A rescuer has a moving stream of animals, equal parts ebb and flow. An animal hoarder’s flow gets backlogged, with an ever-growing collection of animals. After more than four years of successfully rescuing and placing dogs and cats, I was beginning to move a little too close to that line between rescuer and hoarder.

With my new sense of purpose leading me belly-first into the world, I did something I couldn’t even have imagined doing just a couple of months earlier: I shut down Rover Rescue and vowed to bring in no more animals. It felt a lot like cutting off one of my limbs. But I was determined to create normalcy for my child, so I bit the bullet and adopted out all but eight of the dogs—not a large number to keep when you’ve been living with two dozen. Among the eight I kept were the little terrier, Rover, and China, the mama black Lab who’d been my first rescue. Because most of the cats were not the cuddly kind or were too old to be placed or had positive test results for feline HIV, twenty cats remained with us.

I turned my attention toward preparing for the baby’s arrival. I transformed one of the freed-up rooms into a nursery and filled it with all the baby furniture I was sure I would need. And once the last of the adoptions had taken place, I had my weekends wide open to spend with my husband, affirming our bond before our baby’s arrival.

Nine months of nesting, seventeen hours of labor, and a C-section later, we welcomed our beautiful baby boy, Jesse, into the world. When I looked for the first time into his little face, I knew I was looking at a piece of my own soul. We belonged to each other inextricably. And my whole being was flooded with a love unlike anything I had ever felt.

Over the next days and weeks, I could not take my eyes off my gorgeous, perfect baby. I cooed over him and watched him sleep, his eyes darting under his tiny eyelids. And just when I thought I’d felt
as much love as a person could tolerate, Jesse would make some new sound or facial expression, and my heart would swell till I thought it might explode. I was terrified of something happening to him, because I knew if it did, I wouldn’t be able to go on living. So I put every ounce of my being into nurturing and protecting him and attending to his every need.

Of course, I still had a menagerie of animals who also had needs. It wasn’t easy juggling their needs with Jesse’s, and because of Scott’s long work hours, much of the time I was alone to manage it all. Inevitably, when I went to feed the animals, Jesse would cry. And when I went to calm Jesse, one of the dogs would barf or pee on the floor. Just taking the dogs out for a walk became a feat of maneuvering. I’d designed two special leashes so that I could walk up to eight dogs at a time: each leash had one handle but split into four sub-leashes. I thought it was pretty brilliant … except that by the time I’d gotten the fourth dog clipped onto one of my elaborate leashes, the other three dogs were already tangled up. And by the time I’d clipped the second set of four dogs onto the other leash, the whole thing looked more like an intricate spiderweb than a dog-walking system. Add to this picture a crying baby harnessed onto me in a sling; this is what we looked like when we went out into the neighborhood daily.