First came Lily, a cat. Then Jet, a dog. Then gerbils. Parakeets. Little turtles. Goldfish. Chameleons. Guinea pigs. A tiny frog. I become a caretaker for two horses and a donkey and a barnful of kittens and a kennel full of dogs. Polly, a dog. Then college happened and graduate school and then I got married and had a baby and the animal thing started again. Bug, a cat. Fish. A turtle. Hamsters. A rabbit. A guinea pig. Some more cats. Mona, a dog.

Years later, I told me daughter I was sorry I kept giving away her pets. “It’s not about giving them away,” she said. “I never took care of them. It’s about why you got them in the first place.”

I stared at her, feeling like an idiot. Why had I never asked that question?

Here’s why I got pet after pet after pet: I believed pets were like Dunkin’ Munchkins. They were the missing middle. The filled holes. They were the hole, filled. When you are a person in the house with your family, there can be this emptiness, this need to have something you can hold, something that will look at you with unconditional love, or, in the case of a gerbil, fearful hunger, or in the case of a fish, just plain old hunger. Something that will purr. Something that will sleep with you at night and make you feel grounded, safe. Something to call your own.

Here’s why I often gave them away: to see an animal in a cage, whether it was made of metal, glass, or wood in the shape of a house, was unbearable after a while. They were animals. They were supposed to be free. Who was I to put a collar on a dog or a cat, a bit in the mouth of a horse? Who was I to name an animal and claim it as mine?

To have a pet when you were relinquished and then adopted is tricky, tricky business because of one simple fact: almost all pets (unless they are tortoises) are going to die before you do. That means you have brought something into your house that is going to leave you. That means your lizard brain gets to think your mother is leaving you all over again and you get to go into a trauma coma that confuses everyone around you, including yourself (Jeez, it was just a cat. You can get another one. Or, Cripes, it was a stupid turtle that hardly came out of its shell. You’re lucky it’s gone. Now you can get something cool, like a miniature pig.)

When I was a kid, a dead pet earned me one day of skipped school. I both dreaded and looked forward to the day my smaller pets—the gerbils and birds and fish—died because then I could cry and cry and cry and stay in bed and have extra attention. Then I would get to go back to the pet store and pick out the replacement.

The three times my three dogs died were zero percent fun. That was a shocker, each time. Those dogs were family, and now they were gone, and the response I got from the outside world did not come close to mirroring the shocked grief I felt internally. People were kind, but they didn't act in the same way they might have if I’d told them I’d lost a human being. And I wanted that. An outpouring of understanding and gentle love. No, not your dog! Not that. That’s the worst. Are you okay? What can I do? Do you want me to bring dinner over? A cocktail shaker full of martinis? A cat’s death was really bad, but not as bad as a dog’s.

One time I was crying over a breakup, and my therapist friend Pam Cordano said to me, “You’re not crying about him. You are crying about your mother.” I listened to her, but I shook my head. My brain was full of thoughts of this failed relationship, this man. I was pretty sure my grief was about him. “Get into bed, go into the fetal position, and think about your first mother,” Pam said. “See what happens.”

I thought I’d just end up thinking about the guy, but because Pam is smart and always full of good ideas, I got into bed and did what she had suggested. And, sweet lord, as soon as I thought about my birth mother, I was wracked with sobs. What the heck?! I had never even met her after coming out of her body. I wasn’t even thinking about her much these days. Why was I crying about her the day after I broke up with a guy?

If you put yourself in a certain situation where loss or heartbreak is almost a guarantee, you’re going to get a chance to grieve and cry about something you didn’t even know you needed to cry and grieve over. That’s one reason to keep getting pets and then giving them away—the chance to re-experience loss and maybe, this time, get it right. Maybe this time the loss will end with your mother walking in the door saying, “Hello, Darling. It’s been so long. I forgot to take you home with me from the hospital, but I am here now so I can mother you even though you are an adult. I am back. Now we can live happily ever after.”

If only when we were born and separated from our mothers the doctors could perform some sort of Heimlich manuever on our little bodies so the ball of grief we’d just swallowed could leave our bodies and shoot out our mouth into the garbage. We could start life like other kids, with a body conditioned to thrive instead of with a nervous system conditioned to survive.

I wonder what the grief ball would look like. I feel like it would be black and sticky. The diaphragm splits us (if you have super short legs) in half, and it balloons up, massaging the heart and lungs when we inhale, and then it balloons down, massaging our abdominal organs when we exhale. There are tendrils of the diaphragm that attach all the way to the lower lumbar vertebra. This thing that we breathe with, this thing that breathes us, has reach. You could have low back pain because of a problem with your diaphragm!

I feel like the grief ball, when it is still in the body, fucks with the free movement of the diaphragm. I feel like the grief ball makes breathing a shallow thing, an activity that is not so much about massage as it is about bringing in enough oxygen and getting rid of enough carbon dioxide that we don’t pass out. I feel like the grief ball controls everything, creating a body that is barely alive, shuffling from one activity to the next because it has no idea what singing and dancing feel like because those activities require freedom and air.

And if you fuck with the diaphragm, you fuck with the entire body.

I feel like the body would love to shoot that sticky, heavy thing across the room. I feel like the body would be so happy to not have to deal with that shit any more.

So, Dear Doctors, please learn some sumo, judo, yoga move that will free babies of their traumatized beginnings when you take them from their mother’s bodies and hand them off to someone else.

Okay?

If you can take out someone’s eyeball and put it back in with glaucoma cleared, or drill a hole in someone’s head and poke around in the brain to end seizures, I believe you can do this.

I believe you can find a way.

Namaste.