All the years I’d kept Shannon from having a puppy because I knew it would pee on my carpet, claw my furniture and chew my shoes, I never knew it would be so invaluable for teaching that most important high school lesson — abstinence.
Trust me, and I’m sure any parent of a teen would agree, the consequences-of-sex lesson is worth every pair of shoes and one-of-a-kind family heirloom our new puppy has digested over the last three weeks.
Despite early heartfelt promises — “I’ll feed her. I’ll walk her every day. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease let me keep her.” — after just two weeks with her beagle puppy Lucy, Shannon had grown weary of the responsibilities of being a “parent.”
She no longer liked being awakened at 5 a.m., especially in summer when sleepovers might keep her up until 2. She no longer liked scrubbing yellow stains from the carpet or having her feet continually damp from being licked.
Still, she diligently walked and fed and played and made a good puppy mama. But before long, our house began to sound like the toy aisle in Walmart: “No, Lucy.” “Put that down!” “How did you manage to fit that in your mouth?” “If you do that again, I’ll …” “Get that Tinkertoy out of your nose.”
Well, that last one, maybe not so much.
Shannon began to appear tired.
Her clothes looked worn and slept in.
Oh, they were.
Any-hoo. She began to smell of kibble and pat her boyfriend on the head.
The strain was showing.
But she wasn’t ready to admit parenting Lucy was too much for her.
Not even when Lucy:
• chewed one heel of each of three pairs of my good shoes;
• shredded the underside of the upholstered chair in the living room;
• ate the tassels from a decorative cushion;
• buried a (damp) rawhide bone in the kitty litter, then dug it up and reburied in my lingerie drawer;
• gnawed my $50 bra;
• chewed my purse strap;
• uprooted two plants;
• ingested three books;
• broke an ink pen on the carpet;
• chewed the legs of an antique rocking chair that belonged to my parents.
No, Shannon remained steadfast through the loss of all my personal property.
Then one day she called me at work.
“I’m gonna kill this dog!” she hollered.
“Calm down,” I told her. “What’d she do that was so terrible?”
“She ATE my cell phone.”
Though I would prefer life lessons such as these to occur on my $20 phone rather than her $200 phone, I suppose then they would not be life lessons.
Lucy had now taken away Shannon’s ability to communicate with her friends, flirt with boys, order pizza and update her Facebook page — in short, to breathe.
“OK, then,” I said calmly. “Let’s get rid of the dog.”
“No-o-o-o.” Shannon wailed.
“Then you’d better call and complain to someone who didn’t just spend $500 making the backyard into K9-0210 and who isn’t wearing shoes with one heel shorter than the other and whose underwire isn’t biting into her ribcage right now.”
So she called to complain to her friends — I assume she had to relearn how to use a landline — and, when I got home from work, I carefully explained to Shannon how babies are 18 gabillion times more trouble than puppies.
“Really?” she asked.
“Well, yeah. They won’t even go in the yard to pee. My friend Alissa? Her son peed in the kitchen sink once.”
“Uck.”
“Even worse … at some point, no matter how hard you try, kids learn to talk. Remember that time when you were 3 and you asked, really loudly, why that lady’s thighs had dents in them? You wondered if she’d been in a wreck or something?”
She seemed to mull this over. “So how long before you have to stop training kids?”
“Oh, ’bout 25, 30 years. Depends,” I tell her.
“That long, huh?”
“That long.”
“Guess I’ll stick with the dog.”
And my work here is done.
No need to applaud.
Kelly Kazek can be reached at kelly@athensnews-courier.com.
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Discussion
A puppy's a good argument for teen abstinence
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