How A Puppy Changed My Life
His unconditional love for us, has allowed us to connect as a family once again
As a family of five, consisting of three grown-up children and two nearly retired parents, it’s fair to say family life can be busy at the best of times. My siblings and I are all at university now and living away from home, so there’s now that inevitable slight disconnect that comes when family members move away.
We try and maintain that difficult bridge between independence and attempting to enjoy the remnants of our typical family life that continue to persist. As with the vast majority of families, we don’t get on all of the time. We debate, argue, disagree, shout, scream, cry, swear and ignore, much more than we’d care to admit.
Sadly, this has been something that has become increasingly worse over the past ten years or so. Our family home that was once filled with love and care and conversation slowly began to turn into a house full of resentment, anger, frustration, sadness, lost hope, and an ever-present atmosphere of toxicity.
All five of us have our mini personal crises, in addition to all the difficult interpersonal dynamics that exist between each of us, in many forms and due to a multitude of reasons. For years my mother has suggested that we all go to family therapy, in an attempt to bring us back together again, as one strong singular unit. But, life gets in the way and quite frankly the prices for sessions of family therapy are rather steep, to say the least.
To rewind 20 years, my siblings and I had grown up seeing all of our closest friends have dogs and for years we would pester our parents to get us one as well. At one point, my siblings got so desperate, that they resorted to creating a PowerPoint slideshow and presenting this to my parents in our front room.
Alas, it was all for nothing, that didn’t get us anywhere with the dog. My parents did agree to a disappointing compromise of hamsters and goldfish though. A highly frustrating decision on our part, but once we had the new (incredibly cute) pets in the house, it kept our pleas for a canine alternative at bay for another few years.
Years go by, we become busy with exams and all of life’s other necessary evils and we soon forgot our childhood dream of getting a dog.
As I am sure you have already deduced from the title, things didn’t stay this way. COVID was our bargaining chip. The pandemic brought my siblings and I back home again and one of my siblings extremely cleverly asked for a dog for their 21st Birthday.
Incredibly unexpectedly, my parents caved.
We’re 3 months in and we are all utterly in love with our new puppy. Those readers with dogs will already be fully aware of the constant cuteness overload that having a puppy brings. The many laughs, proud moments, frustrating incidents, and moments of pure joy that these adorable bundles of love, parcelled up in the body of small dogs, bring is beyond anything that we could have imagined.
(I’m currently writing this story with our puppy resting his sleeping head on my barefoot, and somehow, I’m managing to fall in love with him even more)
What we were not expecting, however, was how much our new puppy would end up bringing the human variety of our family together. Having him in our lives has reminded us that love can exist in our family house and we can live harmoniously with each other.
We now have a responsibility to look after and nurture this being that brings us daily joy and this sense of responsibility and duty to something outside of ourselves has re-centred the family entirely.
The puppy has acted as a buffer for all the tension that previously existed within our family and we have been able to reconnect as a family once again. We recently went on a domestic holiday to the South Coast and, of course, our new member of the family came with us.
To our surprise, we managed as a family to get through the week of living on top of each other in a small-ish space, without a single argument. Not one.
Of course, there may be other reasons for this well. Maybe we have matured, maybe we have moved on from previous hurt feelings or angry words. But for the most part, I genuinely do attribute our new, happier, family life solely to our new puppy.
Thank you for reading! If you have any comments, feedback or would like to get in touch, please feel free to respond here or message me on, twitter.com/SaraAliUK
