My Baby Boy

There is a large sleeping dog in my lap. His name is Jack. He is always in my lap. I spend hours and hours running my hands over his massive shoulders and thick heavy head. I poke my fingers between his thick toes and around his soft pink muzzle, marveling at this beautiful creature who loves me above all things on earth. Sometimes, i think back to the day he was born.

His mother, Freeda, is the foundation female in my pack of American Bullies. She is the greatest dog I have ever owned, and he came from her first litter.

She and I had been up all night the night before. We knew that the puppies inside her thick bellly would arrive any minute. Her firstborn arrived about the time the sun came up. She and I worked as one, she would push the babies out into my waiting hands in a flow of blood and the fluids of life, and I cut their umbilical cords with my kitchen scissors and rubbed them with soft baby towels, then handed them over to her to take over. After eight puppies, we thought she was done. I sprawled wet and gross and exhausted on the bloody quilt beside her, watching in absolute wonder, the amazing beauty of life and birth and eight tiny miracles squirming around my four legged best friend. Suddenly, she moved away from them, and pushed again… I scrambled for another clean cloth, and caught the smallest one yet.. and realized he was cold and lifeless in my hands. My heart dropped as Freeda went back to tending her eight healthy children.. I wasn’t ready to give up on him yet. I frantically cleared away the placenta and mucus and rubbed frantically at his damp little body. I swung him in the air like the birthing books say to do.. and he still wasnt breathing. Finally i placed my mouth over his fuzzy damp one, and blew my own breath into his limp body. Again and again, until I felt his tiny paw curl around my finger, and his little heart begin to beat in the palm of my hand. I quickly tried to place him on a teat to suck, and Freeda pushed him away. I held him close, my mind filled with bottles and milk and syringes, wondering if I would be able to keep the little guy alive if she refused to feed him. There were tears in my eyes as I looked down at him, I felt all the rejection on earth in his itty bitty body. But then, Freeda reached up and nuzzled him. I carefully placed him in the pile of his squirming siblings, and he latched on right beside them!

It wasn’t long before he became Freeda’s favorite, the crowned prince of the pack, the golden boy of my world. As they grew, and his brothers and sisters left one by one to live their big bully lives in this big bully world, I knew, that while I normally raise females, I couldn’t let Jack go. His first breath was my own. And so he stayed, flourishing in the love and attention in my house full of females.

He is now a thick, gorgeous stud. He is a little over a year old, and soon will be producing sons and daughters of his own. But no matter how grown up he gets.. how high he can jump in my dog park, or how safe I feel when he curls up in my bed at night.. at least once a day, I look into his big bully face, and remember that lifeless little puppy that took my breath, and my heart, and made them his own.