How I love Miss Jones

It was cliché, really, collecting a puppy on Christmas Eve. I had come across the advert for her weeks before, kept coming back to it. Woodbridge, about 45 minutes away. Ready in 6 weeks. 

'It's a crazy idea,' Pragmatism said, when we discussed it at the internal round table later that day.  'A dog? Really? You commute to London. The kids are at school. You're thinking of moving BACK to London....truly...think this one through.'

'But a dog...you heard the paediatrician.  It would be an amazing thing for A. Really. And I don't know...it feels... timely.'

'I think you're overcomplicating life, my love. But those eyes...'

We had a rental car. The Ford had begun to wheeze into oblivion and I was searching for a new/old car. We drove out into the Suffolk countryside and stopped at cattle guard gates. The woman came out carrying the puppy and handed her to me. She immediately wrapped herself around me like a stole, tucking her muzzle into neck. A deep sigh from her tiny body and all of the tension seemed to melt.

The kids were enamoured but unsure. I counted out money, half listened to the woman. 'My husband is on his way back, they were out coursing.'

Of course, this past Sunday, that sentence and its implications would come back over me like a bucket of ice water being tossed over me.  It took several hours before what transpired Saturday afternoon really sunk in. The sheep, terrified and running, pinnned to the cattle guard gate and the river's edge.  The way she ran - ecstatically manic - between them, so purely herself: alive. I've never seen an animal so blissful or intent on on carnage before. 

The police seem to crop up like whack-a-moles. By the end of the chase, when she collapsed in the field and pawed at the officer who had been given leave to shoot her with a request to rub her belly, there were eleven. Eleven police officers, 8 police vehicles and 1 dead pregnant sheep, and I was under caution.

It resolved as quickly as it transpired. But now I have to reconcile the love we have for this creature with knowledge of my own limitations and fact that we are not the best family for her. It hurts. And it isn't pride, although,  the sense of failure is real and ugly. And in my sadder moments, it meshes in with all of my other failures or perceived failures and...well...let's just say I've cried a lot this year and I don't see that letting up soon.

I'm risk adverse, I have been known to say and that 15% chance that she'll escape again or bite a child (admittedly probably one of mine who've spent the last hours winding her up hardcore), is too much for me. It's too much for her. 

And yet...the longer she is here, the more I wonder if I will be able to let her go when the Trust find her that perfect home with other dogs she desperately needs. 

But I love her so much, even when she deliberately wees on my carpet because it's cold and rainy and she doesn't want to go outside.