The Magic Trick
By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann
Back when we were childless, working full time, and new to the area, I told my husband, “If we want to meet anyone here, we’re gonna need a kid or a dog.” Only ready for the commitment of an animal, we adopted a black lab mix and named her Mia. Two years later, and ready to start a family, I gave birth to our first child, a five-pound-fourteen-ounce little girl we named Nadia.
As with many first time moms who own a dog, I worried what would happen when we brought the baby home. Will the dog growl? Bite? Eat her? But instead of jealousy, aggression, or misbehavior, Mia sniffed, licked, and accepted. We—the three of us, home all day together—developed a rhythm. A new normal. From tummy time to bedtime, and the three times a day in between when I’d take the elevator down from our third floor condo with Mia on the leash and Nadia in the stroller.
In another two years, we added a second baby. Then another. Mia no longer came with us to the park. She’d developed an obnoxious whine and a nervous stomach and more times than I care to count, the kids and I would return from our time away to carpets sprayed with doggy diarrhea. I’d spend nap time on my hands and knees, scrubbing, and trying not to cry.
So years later, when the vet said her sudden weight loss was the very very end, my heart tore from the pull of both relief and loss—that this chapter of my life, Of a Dog and Young Kids, was over. I called off work, crawled in bed next to Nadia, and we cried for two days straight.
So why, why oh why oh why, after years of saying Hard Pass to my growing up children begging for a dog, am I now—during [gestures wildly in the air referring to all of this] looking up dogs? What’s wrong with me? Am I crazy?
Or is it something else? Something more?
The baby I had back then just started her freshman year of high school, albeit virtually. She and her brother are nearly my height. We spend every day together yet when my kids wake up in the mornings, I’m almost always asking, Did you grow? I don’t understand exactly what’s happening but I swear they weren’t this big yesterday.
I’ve been walking through these days at home with a fleeting sense of time. I’m off balance with the dissonance of days that fly by, creep, and blend imperceptibly into each other.
I’m sure a dog will help.
I begin to peruse rescue sites, breeder posts, shelter listings. I tell no one. I’m just looking, I say to myself. It’s as casual as if I’m browsing shoes or smelling candles. I ask a few neighbors where they got their dogs. I mention it to a friend. She starts an online search on my behalf and periodically texts me links to puppies as far away as Louisiana.
Then one day, an online acquaintance posts a picture of her new dog. He’s adorable, and a breed I’d been—I am?—interested in. I send her a message and within an hour, I have enough details to discuss the possibility with my husband and after dinner I am—just in case—on my way to the pet store with my two oldest kids for puppy food, toys, and a leash.
“Are we getting a dog?” my oldest son asks before bed.
“I don’t know,” I say. Because I don’t know. I don’t. “Let’s just go tomorrow and see.”
With four kids in bed, I pack lunches, waters, snacks; the leash, a bowl, and paper towels. The next morning, I wake the kids and pile them into the van. We’re off to see about a dog. An adventure, I say. We start the three hour drive and in the rearview mirror, my oldest smiles—as if she knows a secret ... as if she knows I’m as excited as she is … as if she can sense I hear a clock ticking—one that will take her into her own life, away from me.
We arrive at a farm with pigs in pens, chickens roaming, and watermelons growing next to a wooden swing set. Cell phones don’t work here and with my husband back at home, I know this decision falls to me. We walk toward the dogs, and all five of us fall for the puppy with the asymmetrical markings sitting quietly watching us approach.
Just in case and I don’t know become yes and we drive away with this dog laying down between my two oldest kids in the back seat of the full minivan. I don’t know what I’ve just done, but it feels very special.
“I can’t believe this is real,” Nadia says while looking down at the dog. I look back at her from the rearview mirror and take her in. She is no longer a child; she is a woman not yet fully grown. This daughter, the one who might leave our house in four short years, the one who was a baby what seems like a minute ago, has happy tears in her eyes.
My throat catches. Time shimmers. The past, present, and future collide.
I shake my head in disbelief because I knew better. I know better! Yet it happened anyways.They all told me, Pay attention! They all said, It happens so fast.
It’s only a slight of hand, isn’t it? A momentary distraction—Look over here! And we fall for it: the illusion that this day is forever, that this season won’t end. It’s so smoothed, so practiced, so quick. And when we look back, just a second later, our child—the one that was just a baby—is grown.
My heart cannot bear it.
We stop for lunch and the kids take turns walking our yet to be named puppy through the grass. We settle back in the car, and when it’s quiet, my curious youngest child asks, “Mom, how will she get to be a big dog?”
I’m given to practicality and age-appropriate honesty. I’m not a mom who’s ever done Santa or the Easter Bunny. So why I answered my six-year-old this way I cannot explain. But I turn my head toward her and whimsically say, “It’s magic.”
“Magic?” she asks, incredulous.
“Yep. Magic,” I smile. And because we’re at a stop sign, I turn around to wink at her. There is something about this moment in the car, about this time in life, about this chapter that’s about to begin—Of a Dog and Older Kids—that feels simply extraordinary.
“It’s not magic, Mom,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows as if saying Are you sure? and she nods with conviction. I smile and ask with honest interest, “So what happens?”
And what she says next is maybe the real trick, the truest mystery. How we can be here every day, pay attention as much as possible, yet still feel like we’ve missed something. How their incremental and nearly imperceptible changes add up to new stages and skills and seasons. How we put them to bed one night then wake up in the morning and wonder Where did our baby go?
My youngest shrugs her shoulders. To her, it’s not magic. It’s obvious, plain as day.
“Mom, she just grows up.”
Words and photo by Sonya Spillmann.