My dad and I never really had much in common, except a shared love for politics that he purposefully cultivated in me early on. When I lived at home and we’d exhausted all of our favorite current events topics, we’d almost always turn out attention to our cocker spaniel, Cocoa, whose bad behavior was a constant source of anxiety but also a welcome discussion subject. Cocoa’s antics, like his penchant for rug peeing and tearing up the mail, never ceased to amuse and connect us. We loved him, he was part of our family, even though he destroyed the hardwood floors and chewed holes into all of my underwear.
I got Cocoa for my 8th birthday. On that day, my mom showed up at school with this adorable, shaking puppy and I refused to believe he was mine. “Why are you holding Brad Smith’s dog?” I asked. “He’s not Brad Smith’s,” my mom replied, grinning. “He’s your dog.” Cocoa was so scared of everyone we had to carry him to the car. I remember he licked my face on the way to pick my sister up from daycare. My mom went in and got Alison and I sat in the car with Cocoa. My sister couldn’t believe our luck either. Didn’t my Dad say we couldn’t get a dog?
We learned later that my dad hadn’t been informed of the impulse purchase. My mother bought Cocoa in a fit of mania, without consulting him. She was blinded by her desire for love and admiration from my sister and me; she reveled in the gleeful looks that graced our faces when we first saw her holding Cocoa. I like to imagine that my dad took one look at Cocoa, so scruffy and buoyant, and completely changed his mind. In actuality it took much longer to adjust. But my dad did grow to like Cocoa, to bond with him even. He’d never admit it, though.
She will never know the grating awkwardness of parent-teacher conferences. Not because she’ll get bad grades, or because her teachers will hate her (they won’t), but because her parents will drive there together, from the house in which they live together, and when they sit down next to the teacher there will be no doubt about the fact that they are a “unified front.” There will be no “I’ll meet you in the parking lot at five minutes to seven” or “Your Dad’s going and I’m sitting this one out.” After class the next day the teacher will smile and say, “Your parents are so lovely!” instead of knitting her brow and in a low-whisper grunting, “I’m here if you ever want to talk.”
When she accomplishes something notable, the celebration won’t be a source of anxiety. There will be no fretting over whose house to host it at or whether her Stepparents will get along. There will be no awkward silence as she sits by and watches the adults in her life struggle like children with polite phrases. It won’t be about them. It will be about her.
I was 13 when those planes took the towers, crumpling them carelessly against a cruel blue sky. It was on that day I learned what fear was, and since then it’s been difficult to discern whether anxiety is physically braided into my DNA or has been cultivated by outside influences. My father is about as neurotic as they come: pale and freckly with thin, tight lips, glasses perched on the tip of his nose, a master of hand wringing and worst case scenarios. Surely his penchant for panic was passed down to me, but at 23, my anxiety now seems to surpass his. As a journalist and avid media watcher, our obsession with apocalypse isn’t just starting to annoy me; it’s starting to make me sick. Would I be as anxious as I am now if fears of apocalyptic meltdown weren’t wed to our national psyche?