If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be spending a sunny Los Angeles afternoon on Zoom with a pet psychic while Franklin, my one-and-a-half-year-old Maltipoo puppy, contentedly chewed a carrot toy on my lap, it’s safe to say that I wouldn’t have believed you.
With the exception of a forgettable trio of fish and a hamster I inexplicably named Shaquille who was not long for this world, I didn’t grow up with pets. My childhood pleas for a puppy were unsuccessful; ultimately, my mom and dad were right that said puppy’s care would have 100% fallen on them. Later on, as my friends brought home bodega kittens in their backpacks, or put down roots and became dog moms and dads, I happily visited or dogsat. But I didn’t feel quite ready to take the plunge myself.
I was 31 when that changed, and my partner Rax and I brought home a little white dog named Franklin. We’d been talking about it for years: Rax grew up with a little white dog of the extra-crusty variety, and I, not having much dog experience myself, glommed onto his dream. But it all became real when we visited the home of his foster parents, Tiff and Bob, and Frank jumped into my arms, pawing at me with a Little Orphan Annie intensity that we’d soon come to learn was unusual for him. (He’s not a huge fan of new people, as he’ll readily demonstrate with low-pitched yet consistent growls.) But the sweetness he showed to me and Rax that day was all the proof we needed that he (and his little green dog bed shaped like a frog) should be ours.
We’ve now had Frank (sometimes Franklin, never Frankie) for almost a year—his generic leather collar long since replaced by a beaded Susan Alexandra one from my best friend, Jazmine—and in that time I’ve managed to become the kind of person who desperately, urgently needs to know if my dog is happy with the life I’ve given him. (I also get my tarot read and regularly spend $20 a pop on Erewhon juices, but what can I say? Los Angeles will change you, if you let it.) So when the opportunity arose to take Frank to a pet psychic and call it a work expense (!), I instantly sought out the advice of Jennifer Moore of DearHuman.Pet, an LA-based animal communicator and retired psychotherapist whose warm, attentive vibe seemed just right for drawing out the hairy (or furry?) details of Franklin’s past.
The thing about adopting a dog is that most of the time, you never learn much about their origins. We knew Frank had been attentively cared for by Tiff and his prior foster mom, Jeanie, who turned him from a shellshocked rescue into the loving and lovable dog we know now more or less singlehandedly. But we didn’t know precisely where all that original anxiety came from. Given I was delving deep into my own psyche in therapy every week, I reasoned, wasn’t it worth spending an hour and $200 of reimbursable money to do the same for Frank?
“Just like you and your partner were dreaming of a small white dog named Frank, he was dreaming of you,” Moore remarked early in our reading. Immediately, the cynic in me that questioned the very concept of “animal communication” quieted down a bit. If she could see that Frank was destined to be with us, then why shouldn’t I trust her?
Moore went on to say that Frank was “very intelligent” (well, yes! Every expensive trainer we’ve hired to work with him has said so!), and had “a lot to learn” from Rax and me, specifically about interacting with strangers (we like to do it, he doesn’t, ear-splitting barks often ensue).
Then, she said something that caught me a little off-guard: “Franklin feels safe, but he’s guarded.” Just a few hours earlier, my own therapist had said more or less the same thing about me: “Even though you’re in a part of your life that feels secure and stable, it’s normal to keep walls up from your past from when you needed them more.”
I promptly became verklempt at the notion of my Maltipoo and me healing our attachment issues and emotional wounds together—only to dissolve into a flood of tears when Moore asked my permission to share some of the rougher aspects of Frank’s early life. (I’ll keep those private, in the off chance that my dog wants to follow in his mother’s footsteps and write a memoir someday, but suffice it to say that he’s more than earned his trust issues.)
If I had to summarize where Frank’s story and the one that I’m still learning about myself most overlap, I would do so with one word: shame. “I want to reassure him that there’s nothing he could say right now that would endanger him, and he doesn’t need to carry shame about anything that might have gone on in his earlier life because none of it is his fault,” Moore told me as she communicated with Frank (who, weirdly, did seem to know something was going on, even over Zoom: as the two of them allegedly spoke without words, he let me pet his stomach, which he never does).
I know this is all sounding very The Body Keeps The Score: Dog Edition, but it was instantly striking to me how Moore’s comment about shame mirrored a recurring trend in my own therapy sessions. I’m good—no, great—at listening to the more difficult details of my friends’ lives, and encouraging them to show grace to themselves and the ways they’ve adapted to deal with pain. But as I’ve learned from almost 10 full years of regular therapy, I am very, very bad at sitting with anything that’s ever gone wrong in my life without blaming myself first. Seeing that pattern repeated in my silly little puppy made me feel a tenderness not only for him, but for his dog mom, too. (Yes, I now fully own a term I once quietly derided, to the point that the back of my iPhone case reads Frank’s Mom in applique beads.)
Even with the benefit of a pet psychic, I may never know the details of what makes my fuzzy, crusty, beautiful nightmare of an eight-pound dog bark at strangers, flinch from loud noises, and cry like we’re bidding him adieu forever when we drop him at his dogsitter’s house for a night. Maybe that’s okay, though. I don’t need to know every little thing about Frank—or about myself, for that matter—to take excellent care of us both.
