I wanna soak up the sun☀

Soaking up the sun

This week, my dog licked a hole the size of Texas into his back. He is a low-end Goldendoodle, with a golden mom and poodle dad, and I don’t know which parent to blame for his horrendous skin issues. Twelve months a year, the guy is always scratching like crazy, and often, sores appear along his back and groin and develop into crusty scabs. Sometimes the sores are so big they look like he has hives and once, the vet described one particularly oozy one on his neck as “profound.”
 
I come from the “if it’s not on fire, it’s fine” school of parenting. Some of that is due in part to being one of eight children who were mostly left to ourselves unless we were literally burning things, which one of my brothers often did. There was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to raising us, which meant that nobody went looking for any problems they couldn’t see — since there were already so many staring back at us.
 
Much to my chagrin, and despite trying desperately not to repeat the mistakes of the past, I found myself adopting many of the parenting approaches I’d seen up close with my own children. There were so many fixed variables set in place, the whole dynamic that I had recreated within my own family, that it seemed so natural to want to ignore the problems that I didn’t want to see. Unless a child came to me and said, “I am feeling A, B, and C,” or I found them vomiting in their closet after a night out, I left things alone. As you can imagine, that approach came with many repercussions.
 
But now, here I am in the twilight of my parenting, with only one kid officially still living at home who’s away most of the year at college, left with a high-maintenance animal to tend to. Unlike my human daughter, whose gluten intolerance can seem inconvenient sometimes and difficult to understand, I am vigilant about my furry son’s dietary restrictions. He eats no chicken or grains and gets pureed pumpkin added to one of his daily meals of salmon-based kibble. I make sure said kibble is nice and moist for him with a little warm water and sprinkle every meal with some expensive probiotics I’ve started buying. All of his treats are grain- and chicken-free and I even went so far as to buy my neighbor a bag of allergy-friendly treats to feed my dog instead of the Milkbones he slips out of his pocket every time they meet during our walks.
 
Then there’s all the medication he’s been off and on in his six years of life. Of course, I don’t love any of it, but it’s the ONLY thing that helps, especially when the itching is non-stop. When I went on a girls’ trip to Mexico a few years ago, the woman who was watching him at her house ended up dropping him off to be boarded someplace else after two nights of non-stop itching in her bedroom.
 
I thought I’d nipped it last weekend when I put a soft cone around his head to prevent him from working on a big sore that had developed on his back, near his rump. But on Tuesday, the itching seemed to have calmed down so I removed the cone while he sat with me in my office as I worked.
 
While the cone is effective in keeping him from reaching his hot spots, it makes my dog mental. When I Velcro it on him, he freezes and doesn’t know what to do. He can’t relax. He sits alert on his bed and for two nights on my bed as I slept. I kept waking up and seeing his coned silhouette sitting erect on the end of my bed staring into the darkness.
 
Unfortunately, I got distracted by work for about five minutes after the cone was off on Tuesday and then I surfaced from whatever I was doing, I heard licking. I don’t even want to try to describe what I saw. Number one, you’d be absolutely grossed out and number two, I could never do it justice. Let’s just say it looked like someone had tried to flay him.
 
So now he’s back on heavy meds which have stopped the itching and are making the wound on his back look a lot less alarming than earlier in the week. But he’s still not back to his playful self, as if the cone puts some kind of mind meld on him that sucks out his personality – like doggie kryptonite. Having been down this road so many times now, I know that he’ll swing back around. His skin will clear, the cone will be removed and he’ll be back acting as the prince of the house and demanding attention that we all seem more than willing to give.
 
Don’t think I don’t already know that this whole bad-skin situation isn’t an awesome metaphor for a host of issues I’ve tried to ignore in the past. And don’t think you won’t see it crop up in future stories. How I can let problems fester and not recognize troubling patterns until they’re (literally) bleeding.
 
Since I’ve been thinking a lot about my sobriety lately as I work on my book, I can’t help but go there with this analogy. Actually, I’m not sure where the cone part would fit in, but I can definitely see the parallels in not wanting to recognize my drinking in the end as problematic. How it had started out as a little scab that I kept licking until, uh-oh. I had a problem.
 
And that I couldn’t stop. That was the crazy part. Why would a dog keep licking an open wound? Well, why would a perfectly intelligent woman keep drinking lots of wine every night? Despite all rational thinking and feeling horrible each and every morning? I just couldn’t stop.
 
But sobriety has not been like a cone. Far from it. In fact if anything, my drinking fit that bill. It wrapped itself around me and obscured my ability to see all the possibilities and instead, forced me to view life through a very narrow perspective.
 
And now that it’s off, the Velcro of daily drinking ripped from my life, my peripheral vision is no longer blocked. I don’t always love what I see and some things are really hard to look at. But now I do, instead of pretending I can’t see them because they’re just off to the side, piling up until they’re blocking all the light.
 
I see things so much clearer now that I don’t drink every day. All the really good stuff that’s right here in front of me. And the sun on my face feels so, so good. 
 

Use the buttons below to share my newsletter with friends.

SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy

• Do you know Mark & Graham? It's a part of the Pottery Barn family that offers really nice bags and (mostly) leather accessories and they always have great sales this time of year. I always get my girls a monogrammed something for Christmas and right now, they're doing 40% off some great pieces (and 25% extra off sale). I bought one girl this clutch a few years ago that she brought when we went to Aruba and said she uses it all the time. And I own this crossbody bag in black and always get compliments on how nice the leather is. 

• Everlane is offering everything 25% off right now and things are going fast (which is probably a blessing because I am only shopping there for me). As of this writing, there are still a ton of their Italian leather day glove flats in stock and I really love the pair that I bought on sale a few years ago. Talk about nice leather. These very cool pants I bought this fall are on sale, as are these sneaks my son bought me for Mother's Day and these ballet flats that are chef's kiss comfy. These boots are sexy AF if you have little feet (only sizes left) and if money was no object, I'd snap up these in a heartbeat.  

• What's bringing me a lot of joy lately is how good my hair smells from using the F-Layer Conditioning Serum from R+Co's fancier line Bleu. I use a little on the ends of my hair before blowing it dry and again on the ends when I'm finished. Then I spend the next two hours smelling my hands. If I could, I would use it as a body lotion. I picked mine up at Gerber Salon in Keyport, fyi.

• Finally, I binged the new series The English on Amazon Prime hard this weekend. This six-episode Western starring Emily Blunt as a woman seeking revenge wasn't perfect, but it was fun and kept me watching until the end. 

I'm away next weekend so won't be able to spend Sunday with you. In the meantime, you can catch up on past issues and sign up to get in on the weekly fun. I'll see you back here in two weeks! 

xoAmy

Wow. Thanks for reading. Seriously, you're the best.

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

*|IF:REWARDS|* *|HTML:REWARDS|* *|END:IF|*