My Biggest Regret

Everyone has regrets. Some of them are minor, like wearing a skirt that was just a tad too short, and some of them are astronomical, like having a child with a man you didn't love. Nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes. I am no different.

I've done a lot in my life that I'm not proud of. I've made my mistakes, I've fallen off the path, and taken detours on the way to my life long goals, but there is one thing that I regret the most. To some people it probably will seem insignificant, but I feel guilt for it every day.

Two years ago my husband and I were engaged to be married. Two months before we got married, I was in the process of moving out of my dorm and we signed the lease on our first apartment. A week later we walked into a pet store where an adoption event was taking place with one of the local rescues. I immediately fell in love with an eight week old puppy. Batting the eyelashes that framed my big blue eyes, and using his upcoming deployment as an excuse, I was able to convince my husband to adopt the puppy so I wouldn't be alone as a newlywed in a new town for the first year of our marriage. For a week we hid him in my college dorm while we pulled the funds together to pay the $600 pet deposit. The day my then-fiance went to pay it, the apartment manager told him that because our carpet was less then five years old the deposit would be bumped up to $1200. The next day I lost my job.

There we were, a month before we were to get married, no furniture, and an 9 week old puppy that we could no longer afford to keep. We did what we thought was the right thing and found a coworker of my husband's to adopt the puppy.

A month later we were married, I found a new job, and my husband recieved a bonus at work. We talked our landlord into lowering the pet deposit and a month later we adopted another puppy just before my husband left for his eight month deployment.

Six months into the deployment I was about to move into a larger house on base, and my puppy was lonely. I started to daydream about getting another puppy when my husband got home. We were skyping and looking at adoption websites when I came across a dog that was a year old, was the same mix breed as my first puppy, and had the same original name. After checking the stats we determined it was the same rescue we had originally gone to, and after a quick phone call it was determined that it was the same dog we had adopted a year ago. I decided we had to adopt him. I spent the next three days attempting to talk the rescue into giving us another chance at adopting him, seeing as how we broke the adoption contract unknowingly by rehoming him. Reluctantly, they agreed and I drove the hour to go reacquaint myself with this dog.

When I got there I realized it wasn't the same dog. It was the same dog physically of course, but this dog was scared. The rescue had to keep him tied up because he would run and hide from them when they tried to feed him. He growled at everything and everyone, he barked and jumped. He shook with fear. I could see the fear in his eyes when my car pulled up.

While doing the adoption paperwork the rescue workers filled me in on what has happened since I last saw this dog. Apparently from what they can piece together with my help, the person we rehomed him to gave him to her brother two weeks later. This dog then spent the next four or five months locked in a bedroom in an apartment all day, with next to no human interaction. A month before I saw him on the website the rescue had gotten a phone call from a woman who had found him on the side of the road looking like he was starved nearly to death. The only reason the rescue was willing to let us have another chance was because this dog had been through hell, and his behavior showed it. He would need lots of love, socialization, and attention before he would be considered adoptable again.

I loaded him in to my car fifteen minutes later and took him home.

That was a year ago. Since then i've taken him through two sets of puppy training classes, I've had to replace six sets of blinds, a feather down comforter, the window tint in my car, and as of today a bedroom door. There are days he drives me absolutely nuts. He jumps six foot fences, he whines when my husband goes to work, and he jumps and scratches the sliding glass doorwhenever I make him go outside. He smells, and he's obnoxious. He's an absolute terror, and yet I can never get rid of him. I wouldn't trade him for the world. Every single morning I wake up to my two dogs on the bed next to me and feel love swell in my heart, and I know I can never get rid of him, no matter how crazy he is, because I am the reason he turned out to be that way.