We got Target at the perfect
time in our lives. My boyfriend was
working shift work and I was working at a small hotel. This meant that I could bring Target to work
with me on the days we couldn’t juggle our schedules to have somebody home with
him for the majority of the day. He
would sit with me behind my desk, and chew on his bully sticks or play with his
toys. Through January, February and
March I would sometimes go days without anybody checking in or out of the
hotel, so on those days I’d sit in the hallway by the elevator and throw his
ball.
However, at the beginning of
July after a traumatic and emotional week, I left my job suddenly. I went from feeling pretty secure in my
employment, to being terrified in less than three days. As I picked my way home from the hotel on
that last day, numb, and emotionally wrecked, I only wanted one thing: my dog. By the end of that first week I had another
job lined up, but the position wouldn’t be available until the beginning of September. We weighed our options, but I was exhausted
so ultimately it made sense that I would rest and recuperate for 6 weeks and
start my new job fresh in September.
With that decision, began the Summer of Mom and Target.
Target was about 6 months old
by this time and he had reached that adolescent stage where he was “woke” to
the world. Everything was new,
everything was extremely interesting, and everything was fun! He would steal the socks off of my feet if I
didn’t stand up fast enough after I put them on and be off down the hallway before
I could catch him. This was also when he
learned that if he didn’t look at us when we were signing to him, he didn’t
have to listen. A game he still plays,
that we call “deaf and not looking, can’t get mad”.
It was also around this time
that it started to occur to me that a lot of the time hearing dogs picked up on
words without their humans ever having to teach them. My favorite of these stories was one my mom
tells about her bath loving sheepdog. They
would be discussing giving the dog a bath, only to find him a few minutes
later, standing in the bathtub waiting for them. For me, it stood to reason that if other dogs
could learn words just from human’s saying them, then perhaps, if we signed
words to Target when we were saying them to each other, he would eventually
learn. So I taught him. I taught Target about the car, about grandma and grandpa. We learned about the park, cookies, and
about our friend Bob the dog across
the lane.
During our six weeks together,
we became best buddies and Target became all about the mom. We would spend our days relaxing around the
house, learning our signs and occasionally blasting the music and jumping on
the bed. We would take the short walk to
the nearest ice cream store for a cone each and eat it while we watched murder
mysteries and cop shows. Target would
sit next to me on the couch and bark at the murderers or people with guns,
sporting a strawberry ice cream moustache.
My boyfriend would text me and ask how our walkies were, when all we’d
done was a five minute jaunt up the road.
I would wipe the pink evidence off of Target’s face before he got home,
often laughing “Jeez man, don’t rat me out”.
In those weeks at home with
Target, before the chaos of a much faster full time job, before the addition of
a second dog, and before we had a wedding to plan, I built a connection with my
dog that left me with a need to help other deaf dogs.
As hard as it was to leave
Target at the beginning of September to go back to adult life, I did so with a
hunger that I didn’t have before and I was starting to see ways I could really
make a difference.
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