Doggy-Zen

It's been a good 6 months since our last post. At first our silence was mostly due to guilt about not agreeing with, nor following through with, the trainer's advice. And then... to not wanting to jinx something that seemed like it might really have worked.

First, the guilt. The steps the trainer was having us take were making things so much worse. Where Marlo was once leave-able during the days, he had now become intolerant of Mike so much as shifting around in his arm chair. Every movement seemed to signal, "he's leaving me!" and Marlo would jump up from a full slumber to head toward the door.

This was simply not sustainable, and with Mike's high school coaching gig starting in January, he was going to need to leave Marlo each weekday from 2:30 - 6 p.m. We couldn't keep this up.

Mike decided to go back to square one his own way. Each morning while working from home he built up tiny, incremental bits of time when he would leave Marlo and sit on the other side of the front door. He would eventually take his laptop with him and work from the stairway. Success bred success, and Marlo became OK with Mike being on the "other side of the door". Then Mike started to leave the house entirely and work from the corner cafe for short, then longer times. And then he started to leave for baseball. Each day he would take Marlo out to the median to pee just before 2:30. He'd let Marlo back in the apartment, and then close the door behind him - never walking in the apartment with Marlo. This behavior became the golden ticket. And just as baseball season began, so too did Marlo begin to stay home alone.

After a few weeks of Mike's success, I was ready to try leaving Marlo, too. I practiced when I was home alone with Marlo. We'd go out for his afternoon fetching, and I would bring him back, let him inside, and close the door quietly behind him. I could then leave, and he was calm.

We might return to a dog nest in the bed, shoes scattered about the apartment, or pillows on the ground, but never to anything destructive, and never to barking or howling.

Mike is confident that he found his, "doggy-zen" and can typically leave Marlo in most situations now. I'm still working on that level of enlightenment, and need conditions to be relatively ideal for the departure to go without a hitch. We still can't leave at the same time, nor have we practiced that much.

The difference our ability to leave him at all has made in our lives, however, has been extraordinary, and we've spent a good 3 months engaged in normal social lives - going out to dinner together, visiting friends without the dog in tow, and feeling confident being away from home for longer than 4 hours at a time.

We are making the most of our freedom, because as hard-won as it's been, it's about to disappear altogether. Marlo might be fine on his own, but the baby is due in 8 days...