Let me share one of my favourite posts from April’s A to Z challenge.
One of the things I have experienced through having a dog is that there will always be setbacks. And with a rescue, they’re tenfold.
When teaching something to a dog, we patiently build it up. She can’t do the long jump? Let’s take it back, make it shorter, make it lower, make it less scarier. And every new exercise we start from scratch.
We know this, we’re prepared for this, and we don’t mind. But there are days when things she’s supposed to know, go wrong. When she doesn’t know what “sit” means. The task that was easy yesterday seems impossible today.
And just when I would start getting frustrated, the trainers would calm me down.
“It’s ok,” they’d say. “It always happens. They need time to integrate this new knowledge with the old. We’ll just take a setback, and start again.”
And we do. We’re patient with them, we understand what they’re going through. We accept that this is part of life with a dog.
Which made me accept (starting to accept) that this is part of life for me, too. That the same patience and loving understanding I give to Mia, I should give to myself as well.
This post was written from Mia’s perspective but the same applies to me, too. Her journey isn’t that much different from mine.
Read more.