Angel, the stray who wound up having her puppies in my friend's barn. Shenanigans is to the left of the picture. Tom is underneath somewhere.

This isn’t going to be a normal blog post. I need advice, but I want to tell the backstory, which would be far too much for a Facebook post, so I am using this space instead. Not ideal, but hopefully people will read this and give me advice.

Five years ago, Shenanigans and Tom were born into a large litter of mutts. Their mother was a huge dog, part Great Pyrenees, part who knows what (Shenanigans got her mother’s polydactylism, Tom did not). Their father was a purebred Australian cattle dog. The puppies looked like cattle dogs, except for Shenanigans. She was the biggest puppy and mostly solid black. I wanted her and I wanted to name her Shenanigans. But I also wanted a Tom Foolery. One of the plainest puppies, a blue male, crawled over to me as soon as he could crawl and never left me. Whenever I visited the litter, that one puppy would seek me out and stay with me, even when the rest of the litter would reform into a sleeping ball of dog. He was my Tom Foolery.

I found a rescue group to take the litter, but I kept Tom and Shenanigans, ostensibly to give to a friend. But that sort of fell through/I really, really didn’t want to give them up. I wound up keeping them. Evan didn’t want them, and as a result, they became outdoor dogs. I always felt guilty about this, so I tried to make up for it with lots of obedience training, walks in the woods, dog park trips, playing in the yard, even sheep herding. (Tom, who is very smart, was a sheep herding rock star. Shenanigans, the most maternal animal even born, was a conscientious objector. She just wanted to love the sheep.)

Tom Foolery as a young man.

Recently, I’ve been turning them into indoor/outdoor dogs. Whenever they come in they remind me of a passage from C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, where the characters go to heaven and each thinks, “Surely, this cannot be meant for me.” It makes me feel like I failed them. Right now, as I write this, Tom has his nose on my left elbow and a look of pure rapture on his face. He is gloriously happy.

I am the opposite of gloriously happy.

In less than a month, I am going to LA. It might surprise you to hear this, but a BFA in screenwriting only gets you so far in South Carolina. I will be there for a handful of weeks, during which time I am going to try to figure out a way to move there. I might succeed, I might fail. (It’s not something I am going to do if I can’t afford it.)

I have six animals, you guys. The chance I could afford a place in LA where I could house all six is essentially nil.

In an ideal world, I would find a friend willing to keep my dogs until I could afford such a place, but I’m not hopeful that I’ll be able to find such an arrangement.

Placing them permanently seems more likely, but there I run into another issue. Shenanigans’ favorite person in the whole wide world is Evan’s mom, Alice. This makes me pretty confident she’d be equally happy with someone who isn’t me. I’m not sure if that holds true for Tom, who is a one person dog. He picked me when he was tiny puppy and never looked back on that

Little Shenanigans, using her brother as an elbow rest.

decision. So, I could place Shenanigans and not Tom, but I worry he’d be lonely without her. And would it be fair to him, this dog that loves the woods and his backyard, to turn him into a city dog?

It occurs to me that all of this may read like a lot of agonizing over something that isn’t very important, in the grand scheme of things. It’s like in Casablanca when Humphrey Bogart makes the observation that the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans. I’d imagine it amounts to even less when it’s the problems of a couple of dogs. Not that either of them knows there is a problem. Ignorance is bliss. (Tom is still at my elbow, smiling at me. He smiles.)

I know these problems aren’t important, but this doesn’t stop me from crying about them. Tom Foolery and Shenanigans, more than anyone, have been there for me. They have been my solace. They are my family. They are always happy to see me when I come home. There was a time when my life was darkness and anxiety, but when I’d pull up into the driveway and Tom would always be there, rain or shine, his tail a giant windmill of wag.

I have never placed a dog or a cat before. Once you’re a part of my family, you’re a part of my family forever. I keep my commitments and I try my best to do right by them. Not only do I feel like I have failed to do right by my dogs, I feel like I am preparing to repay their loyal service with betrayal.

Shenanigans and Tom Foolery today.

But maybe these are over dramatic and inaccurate thoughts. Maybe they’d be happier in a new home, where they’d get to be inside a lot. Certainly, Shenanigans would like to be a professional laying down dog at this point in her life. When we go on our woodland rambles she plods along slowly beside me, only occasionally trotting after Tom. Tom, meanwhile, is still as much of an explorer as he ever was, checking out miles of forest for each one I cover. He always checks in on me, though. He’ll be gone for awhile, but then he pops up, lays eyes on me, and bounds off again. Sometimes, when he gets a little too comfortable with staying gone, I’ll put him on the leash for a few days. He’ll walk patiently beside me, as if he didn’t really want to be somewhere else. He’s a good dog. They’re both good dogs. If they weren’t, this wouldn’t be so hard.

Long story short – I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s best for them. I want to do whatever is best for them. I know that nobody can really answer these questions. But any and all thoughts and pieces of advice would be welcome.

You'd think I'd get tired of looking up pictures of Fightin' Roos. I do not.

Hello FF readers!

Many of you have taken the time to comment/send me a message about my series on marriage advice. Based on reader feedback, I want to throw out a couple of clarifications.

Firstly, a lot of people had a hard time with the “make his tail wag” thing. Before I launched into that, I wrote, “All of the below presupposes the idea you’re married to a decent human being.” I meant that. If you’re being emotionally abused by someone, then no, don’t grovel around trying to make him happy. But if he’s a decent human being, you better believe that I think a woman is best served by trying to empower the man she’s married to.

Here’s another thing – we cannot change anybody but ourselves, but love is transformative. I’ve had the experience of watching my parents’ marriage evolve over my lifetime. They’ve been married almost 50 years now. Every year of their marriage they get better at being married. It’s not easy. Their marriage is not easy. But by relentlessly staying in the fight – by relentlessly choosing kindness, honesty and love – they’ve transformed one another. Personally, I believe their faith enables this transformation. But wherever you want to put the credit, the fact is – these things are possible. These things are real.

What I’m trying to say is, you can take a decent human being and help them become the fully formed person they’re meant to be. Isn’t that a big part of what marriage should be? Enabling your partner to become who they really are? And allowing them to help you become the person you’re supposed to be? And I maintain that ego functions differently in men and women. I would say that men need to be bolstered and women reassured, generally speaking. A grand oversimplification, of course. But I am speaking generally.

Also – the inverse of the above is true, too. You can take a decent human being and make them smaller. The scary thing is, it’s not hard to do. We are always in the process of becoming. We are also always in the process of helping our spouse become the best version of themselves or we are in the process of diminishing them. If there is one point to all of this marriage advice it is: Take heed – it is easier than you think to diminish your spouse. You can be a wonderful human being and still manage to cause significant damage.

Secondly, I appreciate some comments that I read as rather protective of me. I love my fierce friends! They are awesome! And so I wanted to explain my approach. When I started this blog, I was uncomfortable with the public nature of the thing running alongside my own sometimes caustic sense of humor. I made the decision that I would never write anything negative about a private person. (By that I mean, someone not famous. I made one exception for a server named Blake. I stand by that post.) Evan is a private person, ergo I am not going to write anything negative about him. More importantly, I don’t want to write anything negative about him. We are still friends. I feel like I understand the demise of our marriage and I think with understanding comes peace. This understanding doesn’t feel like blame to me – because I don’t blame Evan and I sure as heck don’t blame myself. But in going through Marriage Destruction University I feel like I learned some things. That, to me, is interesting. Things that are actionable are interesting. I find all of this stuff interesting, not sad. Which may be weird, but hey – I’m weird.

Anyway, just so you know I am on the level about this, here are some things about my performance at Marriage Destruction University that are pretty awesome.

I was willing to change my mind.

That, right there, is huge. Once I realized there were problems, I did a bit of an ostrich act for a month or so, but then I got to work. I was willing – and able – to examine myself and make substantive changes. I think that is pretty awesome and amazing. I don’t think there are a lot of people who do that. I think a lot of people cling to what they’ve been doing, somehow hoping that change is going to come, anyway. I think a lot of people get wrapped up in their own ego and get strangled by fear. To be sure, y’all, it’s bad. Marriage Destruction University is a mind-numbingly terrible place to be. It’s scary in there. Like, watching The-Exorcist-when-you’re-eight-years-old scary. It takes a lot of courage, determination and intelligence to learn inside an hostile environment and then apply that knowledge.

I was willing to fight to the death.

Arguable whether or not that’s really a good thing, but I’m still proud of it. Marriage Destruction University is an exhausting place to be. It takes deep reserves of energy to not only keep going, but to keep trying. I tried each and every day. I’m a freaking hero, you guys. A freaking hero.

So, I don’t look at the failure of my marriage as a personal failure. I look at it as an epic voyage into the wilderness, forty days spent in the desert. When I was out there, I found some really fascinating things, so it’s only natural to want to be like – Check this out. I found some fascinating things! Lots of times, though, what’s fascinating to one person is not at all to another. So, there’s that.

None of the above is to suggest I escaped unscathed. I certainly did not. Bad habits were formed, old insecurities reborn. Again, Marriage Destruction University is a terrible, terrible place. But it can also be a place of a learning. On account of being pretty awesome you better believe I tried to mine all the good I could out of the bad.

I have one installment left.

Thank you all for reading. <3