My best friend and my witness

I didn’t know how old Martha was. Maybe she was 11. Maybe she was 27. Probably something in between. Before she came to live with me, she lived in Puerto Rico, she had two puppies, she was cared for by someone who house trained her and also made her afraid of newspapers. Martha was loving and enigmatic. Independent. When we lived in Brooklyn, she w... See more

Martha’s not my child, I’d say, as if I was joking, as if my feelings weren’t hurt. I would say: She’s my roommate. Now I can say, she was not my child, but she was the first member of my family. Martha was my best friend and my witness. I had been on my own for so long, swimming upstream, and now I had a partner in it. There’s a bright line betwee... See more

Adopting Martha, just after my 34th birthday, was a way to acknowledge to myself and to the world that I was living my life, not in anticipation of something else happening in the future, but because it was my one and only life.

For a long time I’d wanted to get a dog, but I had carried this belief that I shouldn’t do it, shouldn’t tie myself down. Some people would say, Don’t get a dog while you’re still single! which really meant, You wouldn’t want to make yourself unappealing to a man who doesn’t like dogs!