Heart of Stone
By Ashlee Gadd
@ashleegadd
The day my husband and three children come home with a puppy, I start thinking about her death.
Elated—and oblivious to my dark thoughts—my husband carries her tiny body across the threshold of our home like a newborn baby. She’s a rescue, a border collie mix, black and white with a stripe down her nose. All her paws are white, as if she’s wearing ankle socks. I don’t have the heart to tell her those aren’t in style anymore.
We name her Luna, which I suggest after skimming a “black and white dog names” Reddit thread.
She’s four months old, which means—if we’re lucky—we’ll enjoy her company for another twelve to fourteen years. This is, of course, assuming she does not run away, get hit by a car, or die prematurely of some kind of dog cancer.
My kids are now running around the backyard, shrieking and laughing, giddy, showing Luna her new home. My husband is looking at her the way he used to look at me. Like a man in love. I appear to be the only one doing the math, thinking of how heartbroken everyone will be when this dog dies sometime around 2037.
***
I had a dog as a kid, although to this day I do not remember ever loving her the way children love dogs in movies. A fawn-colored boxer with brown eyes, my parents got Sophie in 1985, the year before I was born. In July of 1998, at the ripe age of thirteen, Sophie needed a heart transplant. Due to her age, the vet recommended my parents put her down. According to my mom, she had warned my brother and me of this possibility, and took pictures of us with Sophie that morning, just in case she didn’t come home.
I don’t remember that conversation, nor do I remember taking pictures. I only remember this: standing in the backyard of my best friend’s house, where my dad picked me up after the vet appointment and told me Sophie was gone.
It was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry.
***
It’s a good thing my husband and I met through a mutual friend because I’m not sure we would have matched on a dating app. His profile would have said, “Must love dogs,” and mine would have said, “Not really an animal person” (wink emoji to soften the horror of that statement).
In the three years we dated, it’s possible he downplayed his love of dogs while I downplayed my disdain for them, each of us secretly hoping the other person would change their entire personality. No such luck. We got married and started what would become a seventeen-year argument, the longest fight of our entire relationship. He desperately wanted a dog and I desperately did not. This became a legitimate point of tension between us, but also an ongoing joke at my expense.
What’s wrong with you?
Why is your heart made of stone?
What happened to you as a kid?
I laughed it off. Embraced my cold, black heart. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Aside from that one time a dalmatian jumped on my chest when I was seven years old, forcing my body back into a rosebush filled with thorns, I didn’t suffer from dog trauma. And my heart was soft, in other ways. I loved my best friend. I loved the beach. I loved my ice roller.
But I did not—and do not—love dogs. I do not love the way they bark. Or the way they jump. I don’t love the smell, the drool, the destruction, the added responsibility and cost. I value my spotless furniture, free of dog hair, as much as I value my freedom and spontaneity.
I’ve heard that people who don't love dogs are mostly selfish sociopaths and walking red flags. To be honest, I’d be willing to accept both of those labels if it meant keeping a quiet, clean house.
If you were to ask me why I didn’t want a dog, I could easily give you twenty reasons. If you asked my husband why he wanted a dog, his answer would be simple: “Because they love you.”
***
We had been married for a little over a year when my husband’s childhood dog, Callie, had to be put down. I came home to find him sitting on our bed, tears streaming down his face.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” he whispered.
I consoled him as best I could, fighting a feeling of déjà vu. For the second time in my life, I learned that losing a dog was so devastating, it could make a grown man cry.
***
After seventeen years, I officially lost the fight. All the excuses I had made, all the points I had argued passionately on the debate stage—we don’t have space! we’re too busy! we can’t take care of one more thing!—began to fall by the wayside.
We finally owned a home with a decent backyard. My husband—who previously commuted to work and was gone sixty hours a week—now worked from home. Our children, well beyond the baby/toddler years, were no longer sucking the life out of me, physically and emotionally. If anything, they were old enough to handle feeding, walking, and cleaning up dog poop. They were old enough to collude with my husband and use ChatGPT to prepare a presentation on why we should get a dog. They were old enough to make me feel guilty, is what I’m trying to say.
Slowly but surely, they broke me down, four against one.
“I’m running out of excuses,” I confided in my friends one day. “Only a monster would keep saying no.”
***
As a mother, I want to protect my kids from all kinds of things: guns, porn, drugs, violence. Sometimes I catch myself even wanting to protect them from basic emotional turmoil, things like disappointment, regret, embarrassment and heartache.
Until there was a living, breathing puppy in my house, I did not realize that perhaps my resistance to getting a dog went deeper than hair shedding on the furniture. While my aversion to picking up warm poop in small bags is very, very real, I can now see that part of me resisted the idea of getting a dog for so long because I knew my kids would fall in love with her—and that she would eventually die and break their hearts.
But don’t I want my kids to fall head over heels in this world? Don’t I want them to stay soft and tender? To remain vulnerable against the hardness of life? To accept the risks of experiencing pure, unadulterated love, even when it ends in heartbreak?
As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal … Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
As much as I want to protect my kids from all forms of harm and discomfort, I don’t want them to live with hearts of stone. On the contrary, I want their hearts to be wrung out—delicate and tattered from so much use evidence of their untamed affection for every good thing offered to them.
***
We’ve had Luna for six months now, and I already can’t imagine our family without her.
I am definitely annoyed about the dog hair, but sometimes when nobody's looking, I slip Luna a piece of chicken in the kitchen. While I still occasionally think about her impending death, I also know, as the great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson once said, “It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Isn’t this what it means to be human, to be alive? To profess love when it might not last, to unabashedly chase a dream when failure is possible, to bring home a pet who will only live one decade if you’re lucky?
I walk into the living room where Luna runs over to me, her tail wagging back and forth at a dizzying pace. My son looks at me in disbelief.
“Why does her tail always wag so hard when she sees you?” he asks, almost accusingly.
“Because Mom plays hard to get,” my husband jokes.
I don’t tell them about the chicken.
Instead, I lean down to pet Luna, scratching her behind the ears, and feel my heart of stone soften, just a bit.
Words and photo by Ashlee Gadd. Ashlee Gadd is a wife, mother of three, believer, and the founder of Coffee + Crumbs. When she's not working or vacuuming Cheerios out of the carpet, she loves making friends on the Internet, eating cereal for dinner, and rearranging bookshelves. Her book, Create Anyway: the Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood, is available wherever books are sold. You can also keep up with her work on Substack.