Anna Bernard

As I was coming to terms with not being a mother, I was getting onboard and even excited about the freedom and choices ahead of me but I still had that nagging anxiety of the love I was going to miss out on. The love I’d been told about for years.

A friend once posted her sonogram on Facebook and the first comment underneath was ‘Welcome to the best club in the world!’ Nauseating yes, but it also touched a raw nerve. What was I missing out on? I was worried about how I was going to fill the years ahead of me and what was I going to do with the love? I felt like I’d moved through the grief of childlessness as far as I could at that point in my life and I was at the point of grief just being love with nowhere to go.

I’d always wanted a dog and I’d just turned 50; the time was right. I’d wanted a basset but was worried we’d both never leave the sofa, and then I found a cross breed called a hush basset which had some spaniel bounce in there. I picked him up just before the second lockdown and decided to call him Ken, mainly because it made me laugh. Ken is an interesting looking dog; he has the lovely long silky ears of a basset with a cute spaniel face, then a long basset body with short legs. He’s ridiculously handsome and comical at the same time, with the most friendly gorgeous nature. We would get stopped all the time by people commenting on how lovely he was (‘Yes I know’ – as if I gave birth to him) and asking what he was. As we strolled around the neighbourhood, Ken would get all the pats and tummy rubs while I’d chat to the other dog owners and people in the park. People who I’d walked past probably for the last 10 years but never connected with.

I was deeply in love, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t lonely.. Ken is excellent company and the unconditional love I had for him was reciprocated. It was transformational.

Friends with children that had drifted away started coming back into my life, especially ones that were able to understand my relationship with Ken and compare it to their anxieties and responsibilities around their children. The wall between us wasn’t so high anymore.

One friend seemed to need to hammer the point home that dogs were nothing like children because they didn’t provide a legacy in your life. She didn’t mention love. I have a theory that the reason why we as pet parents have such an intense relationship with our dogs or cats is that we know we will outlive them and that at one point in the not too distant future, we will feel that grief. She either didn’t like it or didn’t get it when I explained that theory. I wonder why? Genuinely. Who judges what love is better than another. It strikes me as petty and futile. I’m sure the patriarchal media is playing it’s part in creating this stand off between pet and human parents but we can resist it; it’s just women pitted against women yet again. It’s both frustrating and patronising. Love is love is love right?

Full disclosure, I will be more upset when Ken dies than when several members of my family do, and I know I’m not alone in this. There are more and more articles being written now about grieving pets and how it’s one of the hardest experiences we can go through. Isn’t it about time we embraced that as a society and respected our feelings as well as value these important game-changing relationships.

I now do Xmas cards every year with Ken and I on the front; he is my family and whereas I used to be slightly ashamed that there wasn’t a partner and several children by our side, I am eternally grateful that we found each other so choose to publicly celebrate that with a twist on the standard version. And what other people think about that it none of my business.

I had spent much of my life trying to straddle two lives – the life I thought I was supposed to live and the one I was actually living; always thinking that I need to cross the river to get to the other side where everyone else was living a proper life with babies and pensions. Ken completed me; or rather the love completed me. After much soul searching, he also ended the internal debate of whether I should have had a child by myself. Having a dog is all consuming and restrictive in itself but it’s worth it. I realised, being a single parent to a human by choice was absolutely not for me. Yes I won’t get to feel parental love which was the source of my sadness for years but now I get to have a great life and feel a huge love for Ken and that’s more than Kenough for me.