The First Night and What It Asks of You

I heard the puppy whimper at 2:47 a.m. I know the time because I was thinking about it all night, staring at the clock in desperation. She was only a foot away from me in the crate and the sound she made surprised me. It wasn’t a full blown, howling, puppy wailing incident. It was a confused, little whimper.

I got out of bed, and my husband stayed plain, clear, steady, unmoving.

At the time, it felt worth mentioning, but in the morning, it became clear that it wouldn’t matter who did what. We’d be equally drained.

The thing nobody tells you about the first night is that hours reform themselves.

Time stretches in quantities like at an airport or hospital. Each minute is endless and gone in the blink of an eye. You are hyper aware of your cold feet and tired body as you stand there. It pulls you up from another place outside of your head to say: this is it. This is the first of all the nights.

I took her outside. She sniffed the grass and then looked up at me like I had answers. I didn’t have answers, but I had a treat and some calming and consistent phrase from a book. She finally went, and to the praise of my voice that was still a praise, I quieted myself in recognition of the dark windows of the neighbors.

Then, back inside, back to the crate, back to bed. Another hour. Another cry. Repeat.

By the third or fourth round, I no longer was paying attention to the time. I was just doing the motions as were you and we were both trying to make sense of the rules of the new world we had found ourselves in.

Being completely shattered encourages true tenderness. You stop performing. You stop trying to do it the right way. You are just there, feeling it. You are sitting on the kitchen floor at four in the morning with the dog that enjoys chewing your pajama pants and you are too sleepy to be anything but soft.

At five, she finally fell asleep, curled in the corner of her crate with her face pressed against the bars as if she was trying to stay as close as possible. I was lying there watching her tiny ribs, and fall and rise, thinking about how just two days ago she was with her mom and littermates, and now she was here with us in this strange room trying to be brave.

I felt like I did nothing right. I probably waited too long between trips outside. I definitely showed too much inconsistency about whether I was responding to every sound or trying to let her settle. I questioned everything.

But she was asleep, and we made it through.

No one can really prepare for the first night’s chaos. Sure, you can set up a crate, have cleaning supplies ready, and read the books. But the experience is something different. It opens you in a way you weren’t expecting. It’s an odd privilege being the one who someone cries for in the dark.

When the morning finally came, with light and the songs of the birds, she woke up and looked at me with trust, what I can only categorize as trust. Unearned. Absolute.

I thought: okay, we start again. We’ll figure this out.