Miserable Moose

My dog hates me. I know it seems impossible. I mean, dogs are known for offering the ultimate unconditional love. The adoring eyes, the wagging tails, the slobbery kisses. Man’s best friend, right?

Not Moose.

But Moose has never been your typical dog. Sure, he’ll wag his tail a bit when you first walk in the door, but he’s never been like Griffin ("my" dog that lives with my mom in Atlanta). Whether you’ve been gone 5 days or 5 minutes, Griffin is so excited to see you he can hardly contain himself – in fact usually he can’t and ends up peeing a little all over your shoes. And nothing says love like a bit of urine on your Nikes.

For Moose, on the other hand, it always seemed as if he could take us or leave us. We used to joke that he was a cat-dog, content to lie on the couch all day – our presence didn’t seem to matter one way or the other. But all that has changed now. Turns out, Moose really likes company – just not ours’. He follows my mother-in-law around all day long.

It’s fine, really. I mean, I try not to be jealous. It’s good that he enjoys her company while Roger and I are at work. However, when I come home from work, I want my little family to be together – me, Roger, and Moose.
But it’s not as simple as that.
If we’ve been at work all day, one of us (I always nominate Roger) has to go up to the main house to get Moose and bring him down to the cottage. This involves forcibly grabbing his collar and dragging him down the back steps. But once inside, he stands at the door and whines to go out. Now, we trained Moose to whine at the door when he needs to pee, so it’s only fair that we let him outside when he starts this routine. The problem is – he doesn’t actually need to pee. We know this because when we let him out he runs directly to the door of the main house and whines to be let inside with them.

He will scream and whine outside of their front door indefinitely creating one of the following scenarios:
1) My mother-in-law begrudgingly lets him in to quiet his whining until Roger or I to go up to the main house and drag him back to our cottage.
2) Roger or I hear him screaming and sprint up to the front yard to drag him back to our cottage.
3) My mother-in-law shouts down for us to sort out our dog causing us to sprint to the front yard to drag him back to our cottage.

He has made his preference for the main house painfully clear, but there are several plausible explanations for this.

1) His girlfriend. Tigerlily (the cat) lives in the main house and Moose is still very much obsessed with her. When he’s not chasing her around the garden, he settles for lying on the floor beside her while she sleeps. He’s completely whipped.

2) His girlfriend’s food. Perhaps the only thing that rivals Moose’s love for Tigerlily is his love for Tigerlily’s food. My mother-in-law tries to remember to put the cat food up on the table if Moose is around, but if he times the whining-at-the-door routine just right, he is guaranteed an extra meal of tasty tuna.

3) My mother-in-law. The first two reasons for Moose’s fickleness I can cope with, but this one kills me. The idea that my child loves the evil M-I-L more than me is just too heartbreaking to comprehend. I don’t care if he only loves her because she gives him food that he shouldn’t have. The little traitor will pick her over me every damn time!

After forcing him back to the cottage for maybe the third time in any given day, Moose will reluctantly climb up on the couch, turn around a few times, give a loud sigh – so as to let us know he’s not happy about the situation – and finally curl up in a ball as far away from us as possible while still sharing the couch. This must be what it feels like to have a teenager. I love that damn dog so much, and yet with his huffing and rolling of eyes (I'm serious), he makes it blatantly clear that he wants nothing to do with me.

I don’t know what to do. I bribe him with dog treats (but he prefers the bits of fillet that the M-I-L gives him). I’ve started putting ice in his water bowl (something I used to make fun of the M-I-L for doing). I brush him. I talk to him. I play ball with him. I take him to the park. But he still prefers her.

I don’t know, maybe a year later, he still harbors bitterness over the thirty hour journey in a plastic coffin. If that’s the case, it’s certainly not gonna get any better when we take him back to the US. But at least then he won’t have the option to abandon me for the M-I-L. And once again I can fool myself into believing my child loves me.

Yeah, I'm clearly a great mom...and you wonder why I don’t have kids!