Gone to the dogs

I held my last dog training class the other night. My very last one ever for the foreseeable future. My students all graduated but it was an advanced level class with a Canine Good Citizen test at the end.

No one passed the test.

I'm trying not to feel completely responsible for their less than stellar performances. I was their trainer after all, and their success and failure reflects on me as a teacher. Or something like that.

I'm over it now.

What I'm not over is the idea that I am no longer employed.

I decided awhile ago I was not going back to teaching classes once this one was done, at least not until this Chicklet is born and out of her lumpy phase. In one capacity or another, I've been teaching for the past five years and I need a break. You probably don't realize how much pressure there is in teaching, of all things, dog training, but it's a lot more stressful than you think. Stressful and wonderful. Recently I'd cut back my hours so much that I was literally only working about three to five hours a week so I feel like I've weaned myself off the job pretty well. But I still can't settle on the fact that I'm unemployed. That I'm simply a stay at home mom now.

This is the part where you really give it to me. Being a mom is a job, you'll insist, a full time job. A full time job with constant overtime and very few perks, like sick days and, if we're being really pesky, money, but a job nonetheless. The hardest job you'll ever love.

Cough cough wheeze cough choke choke cough

Believe me, I've bought into all that propaganda too. But the fact remains, I've been working since I was thirteen and with the exception of a few months after my first wedding when I quit my job and I had this silly little breakdown that drove me into a deep pit of depression, I've never been unemployed.

Oh, I never told you about my breakdown? It's not one of those things I like to bring up. It tends to put a damper on the conversation when I try to bring it up between the coffee and the cookies. Can you pass the sugar - yeah I had a slight nervous breakdown and didn't really leave my apartment for two months all because I quit my job after I married the wrong man and my life was in a dizzy spinning vortex of confusion - and the half and half too? Thanks.

So you can see why I'm a little freaked out about not having a job.

I am defined by my job. I like working. I like contributing to society and pulling in my own paycheck, even if it is pitifully small. I like going to dinner parties and having something else to talk about besides my kid. And believe me, tell people you're a dog trainer and you'll have a party buddy all night.

In the short term I'll be putting my business cards out there and taking a few private clients but I don't think that will really take off until after the baby is born. It's getting kind of hard to get down on the floor with a wriggly puppy to teach him to sit with this basketball in my abdomen getting in my way. In the long term I still see myself owning my own business.

In the meantime, I need my fix. I'd hate to accost some unsuspecting person on the street about their dog, so send me your dog questions and I'll be happy to answer them on this here blog. I let the other site lapse so let's move it here. I'll be the Dog Lady and we'll have an "Ask the Dog Lady" post every once and awhile. I'm just brainstorming off the top of my head here, but I like the sound of this. And how often do you get advice like that for free?

Send them to my email (see it up there? In the upper right corner? Up a little higher... Yeah, that's it.) and I'll hook you up. You'll be doing me a favor. No, really. You'll probably be doing my neighbors a favor too because if I have to only deal with their psychotic, out of control Chihuahuas that are never on leash, things could get ugly.