The First Night and What It Asks of You

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

I got out of bed while my husband stayed impressively still.

By morning it would not matter who did what. We would be equally drained.

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

Time stretches the way it does in an airport or a 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. Something outside your head keeps saying: this is it. This is the first of all the nights.

I took him outside. He sniffed the grass and then looked up at me like I had answers. I did not have answers, but I had a treat and a calm, consistent phrase from a book. He finally went, and I kept my praise to a whisper out of respect for the neighbors’ dark windows.

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 going through the motions, 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 Scooby Boy, a puppy who is happily chewing your pajama pants, and you are too sleepy to be anything but soft.

At five, he finally fell asleep, curled in the corner of his crate with his face pressed against the bars as if he was trying to stay as close as possible. I lay there watching his tiny ribs rise and fall, thinking about how just two days ago he was with his mom and littermates, and now he 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, he woke up and looked at me with what I can only categorize as trust. Unearned. Absolute.

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