Read Online My Accidental Jihad by Krista Bremer - Free Book Online
Authors: Krista Bremer
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Labrador, Sophie, had a litter of puppies. The night she delivered her pups, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the soft click of her paws across the linoleum floor. She laid her wet nose on the edge of my bed, nuzzled purposefully beneath my covers, and snorted. She sniffed a pile of clothes on the floor in my closet and then left as abruptly as she had come. The next morning, when I woke up, I found her at the foot of my parents’ bed with seven tiny seal-like puppies in a squirming pile beside her engorged nipples. She looked exhausted but serene, and licked her new puppies with a steady, focused intent.
She started out as such a dedicated mother, rarely leaving the basement room in which her puppies were contained. When she briefly left them to eat or to relieve herself, she trotted up and down the stairs like she was late for an appointment, and in response to sounds only she could hear, her head jerked back over her shoulder toward her litter. At the slightest yelp, she’d spin around on all fours and leap like a jackrabbit back in the direction of her pups. But as they grew, her once-lustrous yellow coat turned dull and patchy and her furry brow wrinkled as if she were perpetually worried. No matter how many hours she lay in abject surrender, with her puppies clamoring and biting and sucking, they were never satisfied. It wasn’t too long before she growled when a puppy bit down too hard on a raw nipple or snapped sharply at puppies who playfully bit her ears. She stood unsteadily and walked toward the stairs with several puppies hanging from her belly, still latched to her teats. One by one they lost their latch and fell with a muffled thud onto the carpet. Sophie didn’t even break her stride.
In the early weeks after Aliya’s birth, these memories of Sophie came to me after midnight, when I sat for hours in a rocking chair in our living room, cradling my tiny daughter in the dim light of a winter moon. I was flooded with empathy for the family dog of my childhood: I fully understood her surrender, dedication, and exhaustion. The old hardwood floor creaked beneath the weight of my bare feet, which pressed in a rhythm that slowed gradually until I became too exhausted for even that tiny motion of my toes. Aliya was quiet and alert. I lifted her face to mine, my hands encircling a torso so small that my fingers were interwoven along her back. Her body was a soft, useless weight collapsed into a pile on my chest, but her eyes were luminous. Hour after hour we sat together in the dark, hearing nothing but the occasional exhale of our heater or the distant rumble of a car engine. Her commanding presence filled the empty room: an honored but unfamiliar guest had taken up residence in our home.
“You must be so proud,” murmured a friend who stood beside me admiring her pink sleeping face in her bassinet. But I took no more pride in her than I would in a rainbow appearing after a thunderstorm.
Long after the pulsing umbilical cord between us had been cut, we remained closely tethered by a continuous stream of milk and love that flowed from my body to hers. I had an insatiable appetite for her smell, her body heat, the taste and texture of her skin. I curled her into the crook of my arm, squeezed her into my chest, rested my nose on the top of her scalp and inhaled as if breathing in the scent of a flower. “I love you all the way to the moon,” I read to her from a book. And then thought:
To the bottom of the ocean, to the farthest reaches of infinity, around the corner into a black hole, and out the other side.
The first time I left her behind and flew to another city for a work commitment, she was less than two years old. Our impending separation loomed before me, as terrifying as an amputation. I grew as frantic as our dog once did when the door between her and her puppies accidentally swung shut—when she clawed and whined and sniffed desperately at the sliver of light beneath it. But at the airport, as
She started out as such a dedicated mother, rarely leaving the basement room in which her puppies were contained. When she briefly left them to eat or to relieve herself, she trotted up and down the stairs like she was late for an appointment, and in response to sounds only she could hear, her head jerked back over her shoulder toward her litter. At the slightest yelp, she’d spin around on all fours and leap like a jackrabbit back in the direction of her pups. But as they grew, her once-lustrous yellow coat turned dull and patchy and her furry brow wrinkled as if she were perpetually worried. No matter how many hours she lay in abject surrender, with her puppies clamoring and biting and sucking, they were never satisfied. It wasn’t too long before she growled when a puppy bit down too hard on a raw nipple or snapped sharply at puppies who playfully bit her ears. She stood unsteadily and walked toward the stairs with several puppies hanging from her belly, still latched to her teats. One by one they lost their latch and fell with a muffled thud onto the carpet. Sophie didn’t even break her stride.
In the early weeks after Aliya’s birth, these memories of Sophie came to me after midnight, when I sat for hours in a rocking chair in our living room, cradling my tiny daughter in the dim light of a winter moon. I was flooded with empathy for the family dog of my childhood: I fully understood her surrender, dedication, and exhaustion. The old hardwood floor creaked beneath the weight of my bare feet, which pressed in a rhythm that slowed gradually until I became too exhausted for even that tiny motion of my toes. Aliya was quiet and alert. I lifted her face to mine, my hands encircling a torso so small that my fingers were interwoven along her back. Her body was a soft, useless weight collapsed into a pile on my chest, but her eyes were luminous. Hour after hour we sat together in the dark, hearing nothing but the occasional exhale of our heater or the distant rumble of a car engine. Her commanding presence filled the empty room: an honored but unfamiliar guest had taken up residence in our home.
“You must be so proud,” murmured a friend who stood beside me admiring her pink sleeping face in her bassinet. But I took no more pride in her than I would in a rainbow appearing after a thunderstorm.
Long after the pulsing umbilical cord between us had been cut, we remained closely tethered by a continuous stream of milk and love that flowed from my body to hers. I had an insatiable appetite for her smell, her body heat, the taste and texture of her skin. I curled her into the crook of my arm, squeezed her into my chest, rested my nose on the top of her scalp and inhaled as if breathing in the scent of a flower. “I love you all the way to the moon,” I read to her from a book. And then thought:
To the bottom of the ocean, to the farthest reaches of infinity, around the corner into a black hole, and out the other side.
The first time I left her behind and flew to another city for a work commitment, she was less than two years old. Our impending separation loomed before me, as terrifying as an amputation. I grew as frantic as our dog once did when the door between her and her puppies accidentally swung shut—when she clawed and whined and sniffed desperately at the sliver of light beneath it. But at the airport, as
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