Fostering Impulse
As a kid growing up in rural Northern California, our house was a bit of an animal farm. We had sixteen acres of land and our pets included a cat, a dog, a rabbit, a snake, a hamster, guinea pig, pond of goldfish, a turtle and a rat named Clicker Starman. I grew up loving animals and they were the means to my allowance.
Roughly three weeks ago I texted my husband, who was away on work travel, to tell him I found a dog on a local rescue website and wanted to foster it. For almost six months I’d been wanting to try out fostering and I’d finally worn my partner down to a “Sure. Okay. We can try it.”
As I escorted the dog through the city shelter parking lot, signs of lifelong neglect were immediately apparent. Moving his 20-pound body across the asphalt, the dog’s back hips swayed on two damaged legs, probably hit by a car, dropped as a puppy or worse and never taken to a doctor. I would soon learn he had kennel cough, a urinary tract infection, had not been neutered and was coated in fleas. He was a stray, like many at the shelter, where the intake is over 100 dogs a day.
Our next 48 hours were tumultuous, to say the least. My dog, a spoiled purebred diva, was mostly indifferent but sometimes protested with violently lunging at or threatening to bite our foster guest. I kept them separated, alternating who was free and who was in a crate, protesting with cries and barks.
I gingerly bathed the foster, fed him, found a blanket to drape over his crate. He couldn’t walk on hardwood floors or navigate the stairs. My house has no carpet. And it has three stories. I carried him floor to floor. The fleas persisted. I found one in my bed. I cried a lot.
I could write a novel about this experience. It has been a big moment for me. But taking a step back, I know fostering one dog, one time, for three weeks, is not the biggest deal. It isn’t monumental, does not deserve applause. It is a small act. A thing I could do. And out of it I have gotten so much more than I have given.
For one thing, it has been empowering to see how my decision to do or not do something saved the life of a living being. Rarely are things so clear between A or B.
More than that, though, I acted on a whim. On impulse. Sure, in those months of pleading with my husband I’d plotted where to put the foster dog’s crate, but I didn’t have much in the way of plan. And at my core I am a planner. I plan my grocery list a week in advance and, up until recently, I color coordinated my closet. The labels of condiments in my fridge are all facing out. Leftovers in my freezer are labeled and dated. I rarely deviate from order. So when I fostered a dog without a plan I broke with a very deeply engrained norm in operating procedure. I won’t say it was liberating or the first time I have ever gone rogue. But it was good, healthy even, to be reminded that I can figure it out unknown things by force of sheer determination. I do this all this time at my job, but it had been too long since I had done something without calculating the risks, weighing the odds in my personal life.
When my husband got home he wanted to meet the foster dog right away. Quarantined in the garage following my flea panic, the pup was soon moved to the living room at my husband’s request. They were soon watching basketball together, our dog perched on the couch and the foster under his feet. When I went upstairs my husband asked me to leave the foster with him in the living room, and he asked to be the one holding his leash on Saturday morning walks. My husband didn’t hold a grudge about the disruption I’d unleashed on our routines or hesitate to show affection; he jumped in and helped me navigate something new.
So what I mean to tell you is that I had this unexpected experience because, without much consideration, I just said “yes.” I kind of wanted to know what would happen if I didn’t have a plan. And I still made it out okay. More than okay. I took a little gamble on myself and my ability to wing it. And in return I was reminded that doing good, in new ways, without warning, reveals to ourselves who we are.