Teddy wasn’t my dog. He belonged to the entire neighborhood- all my aunts, uncles, cousins..... But without him, I’d have never survived my childhood. My mother would have one of her irrational moods and send me to my room because I did something bad- I never knew what. I tell you now, if a child doesn’t know exactly what behavior they did that was wrong, they WILL not understand that it was the behavior that was wrong. They WILL believe it is “they who are-” well, lots of adjectives come to mind and all of them painful, still. Words like “bad”, “worthless”, etc. And they learn to believe they really should not be alive at all. If you haven’t lived with those words describing you, you cannot understand the pain, you cannot understand the thoughts that run thru your brain every day on how you should not be alive at all. I spent many an hour in my room, with that pain and emptiness inside me- wishing I could just cease to exist.
But then there was Teddy. He would sit right there in front of me with those sad brown eyes and I knew I couldn’t disappoint him, the one source of love in my life...... And I grew up to believe that no human could ever love me, but I had Teddy, and for Teddy I had to go on.
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