The Wall Behind My Baby’s Crib

I scolded him. I pulled him out by the collar. I started closing the nursery door every time I left the room, and when that was not enough, I put in a baby gate across the doorway, the kind meant to stop a toddler, not a determined sixty five pound dog. Moose knocked it flat within two days and was back at that wall before I even heard the crash.

I want to be honest about how I behaved during those weeks, because it is not the part of this story that makes me look good. I was so tired, and so frightened for Lily in a low grade way that never let up, that I started to resent my own dog. I thought he was jealous of the baby. I thought he had gone a little insane the way older dogs sometimes do. I yelled at him more than once, hauling him away from that wall by the collar while he twisted to get back to it, and I did not stop to ask myself why a calm, gentle animal would tear his own paws bloody over a stretch of drywall unless something on the other side of it actually mattered.

Because that is what I found, eventually, on his paw pads. Small cracked wounds, some of them scabbed, some fresh. A dog does not do that to himself over nothing. A dog does that when he is trying to tell you something and has run out of every gentler way to say it.

The night everything changed was a Tuesday, three weeks ago now. Andy was working late at the grain co-op, and I had just gotten Lily down after an hour of the worst coughing fit she’d had yet, when I heard the sound of real destruction coming from her room, not scratching, tearing. I ran in to find Moose had gotten past the gate again, and this time he had gone all the way through. There was a hole the size of a dinner plate torn into the wall behind the crib, plaster dust scattered across the carpet in a fine gray drift, wallpaper hanging in ribbons, and Moose still digging at the raw edge of it like he meant to make the opening bigger no matter what it cost him.

My first feeling, God forgive me, was fury. All I could think about was the cost of the repair, the mess, the fact that my daughter was asleep four feet away from a dog in some kind of frenzy. I grabbed his collar hard enough to make him yelp and hauled him backward, already composing the argument I was going to have with Andy about whether Moose needed to see a vet about his behavior.

Then I looked into the hole.