I’ve learned something about my daughter lately; something I thought I knew but, it turns out, I did not fully know.
You see, I used to say that my daughter, Jane, is afraid of dogs. But I’m told that what Jane has is a dog phobia.
Except around Jane. If we’re around Jane, we say, “Jane is developing her confidence with dogs.”
There are big differences. I can’t enumerate them, but Jane’s therapist can. The lady has answers. Answers to questions like, “Can you teach my daughter to stop freaking out around dogs?”
Because that’s where we’re at. Twice a month, Jane and I trot off to our shared therapy session, although we don’t call it therapy. We call it “visiting Ms. Maria,” a person I had described to Jane as my friend, which backfired when I didn’t recognize her the first time we met. Jane may be only 3, but she’s no fool: She has two friends, and she knows what both of them look like. So Ms. Maria and I bribed her to overlook the discrepancy with a shower of glittery stickers and, to her credit, Jane’s been playing along ever since.
Does your child fear dogs? Per Ms. Maria, here’s what you do.
Depart from your therapist’s. Find yourself a nice dog—at the park, on the street or what have you. Totally wig out over the dog. Go to the dog and talk to it in baby talk. Use your teensiest, most pinched, highest possible inflection. You’ve never seen a dog before. Your one true love is dogs. You have no concept of social inhibitions. Go go go.
If that sounds like mostly a lot of work for the parent, you’re not understanding me: It is, all of it, work for the parent. Hopefully, you live in a place where you know either A) all your neighbors, or B) none of them. Best-case scenario: You’re planning a move in the not-too-distant future, ideally just as soon as Jane wraps up therapy.
Because there are a lot of other little tricks in this game, and you’ll be performing most of them in public.
Like planting Jane’s feet on the ground around dogs, firmly suppressing her best efforts to shimmy up your neck.
Like expressing your surprise when she begins tearfully communicating her unhappiness about the dog. (Remember, you love/stalk them!) Are you the least observant caretaker ever, or the most selfish? Gathering crowd, you decide!
Like setting an example for Jane as a person who can successfully pet dogs. Here are some things you might now say that you otherwise wouldn’t, as a functioning adult member of society: I see you have a dog! Does your dog like to be touched? OK, because I know I have to ask the owner before I pet their dog, but I also know that doesn’t mean dogs aren’t friendly. Don’t you think?!
Since you’re wondering, I can’t say I’ve ever undergone therapy personally. But I know enough to know what I don’t know about it. You know? I know you shouldn’t show up for your first therapy session unable to decide: Do you most want the door to swing open on the lady from The Sopranos, Robin Williams with a beard or the brother on Frasier?
I know you’re not supposed to think of the therapist as larger than life, or spend the hour needlessly obsessing over what she’s thinking about you, especially since the focus of the hour isn’t you; it’s your daughter and the $155 an hour she’s costing you.
You’re not supposed to not be able to stop comparing the therapist to the only other real-life therapist you know, which happens to be my sister-in-law, and would you believe it? Ms. Maria looks exactly like my sister-in-law! Same hair and clothes, same face shape and expressions. I am 99 percent sure they look exactly alike; 85 percent sure. It’s just that the sessions are private so I can’t fact-check it with anyone, and what if they don’t really look that much alike and I’m only drawing comparisons in my mind, for reasons I can’t articulate without psychological assistance? What then? What are the reasons? And what do they mean as they pertain to my individual happiness and purpose in life?
My purpose in life this month is clear: to tote around the Pup Pad, a notebook I carry at all times in my purse so I can whip it out anytime Jane and I spot a dog. There are a lot of dogs where we live; it’s simply not practical to bodily fling myself onto them all. So for some, we instead police artist sketch. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, and did he have straight fur or curly? Short tail or long?” Dogs that count, for Pup Pad purposes: Ones I did not see. Ones we already drew yesterday, or even a half-hour ago. Ones that are imaginary but Jane insists really were there. Collect 10 dogs in the Pup Pad, and Jane earns a single puppy-paw sticker for her sticker chart hanging on the wall in the kitchen.
To the credit of Ms. Maria, the Pup Pad system is a raging success. Its popularity with Jane overwhelms all of its flaws. Jane has collected five stickers; that’s 50 dogs. And, between you and me, I am not the world’s greatest visual artist. Two kinds of dogs populate the Pup Pad: big and little. So far, she has not caught on.
If the whole concept of a 3-year-old in therapy is sounding absurd, I’m not out to correct you. I don’t disagree with you. This is $155 an hour we spend to talk about whether it would be better to reward Jane’s hypothetical first time voluntarily touching a dog with mini M&M’s or Pez from a dispenser. Also, I’m not sure that I’m not actually the one in therapy. When I told her about the whole sister-in-law thing, Ms. Maria was really interested in that. Like, really interested. She asked me to tell her about my sister-in-law “in my own words.” And recently I told Ms. Maria that, in the time since Jane first began fearing dogs, I’ve noticed some anxiety on my own part around them, and Ms. Maria said, “It’s good that you recognize that. I had noticed that about you.”
There are some things I have noticed about you, Ms. Maria, and the first of them is you’re no brother on Frasier. What’s more, our older kids both go to the same after-school program and you always keep having to check with me about pickup time, which is an obvious time and one that’s not hard to remember. So, for someone who’s supposed to have all the answers, you at least don’t have one of them.
For my part, I’m moving forward, trying to take the things Ms. Maria can offer us and dwell less on Ms. Maria herself. It’s not about Ms. Maria. It’s not about me. It’s a little bit about that $155 an hour. It’s a lot about the Pup Pad. It’s a lot about maintaining some small reputation as a house you don’t have to skip on your trick-or-treat route—that is to say, a house containing sane people, ones with attitudes toward dogs that don’t veer too far either way.
I’m not afraid, necessarily, of being that house, those people. It’s just that I’m still developing my confidence with it.