I love these little people, and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
~Charles Dickens

My son Dmitry was six years old when we adopted him, after he’d spent his entire life in a children’s home in Russia. It was love at first sight for us. But the first few months here were difficult and stressful for Dmitry, who had to adjust to an entirely new life and a new language. The predictable tantrums and the phrases, “No, I won’t and you can’t make me!” or, “I didn’t did it!” punctuated his initial time here. To complicate matters further, just as life was settling down and Dmitry was beginning to understand that he was truly loved and appreciated, my nine-year-old stepson, Frank, suddenly and unexpectedly came to live with us. Dmitry became distraught at this turn of events. It was only later that we discovered, to our horror, that his immediate worry had been that there was, perhaps, a plan to exchange an unruly child for a better-behaved one.

It was in the midst of all this change and confusion that we decided to add a puppy to the mix. We talked with the boys about how the new puppy would become part of our family and how we should treat and take care of it. My husband and I had always had dogs in our lives and never even remotely considered the possibility that this would present any problems we couldn’t easily transcend.

When the big day came, all four of us went to Save-a-Stray. We chose an adorable eight-week-old wriggly black and tan puppy that had just been brought in with its littermates.

The woman at the shelter gave the dog a bath, wrapped her in a towel, and handed her to Dmitry. She sat between the boys in the car on the way home. Our first clue that this dog was not going to be easy came when she shredded the towel by the time we got her home.

The boys named her Maverick, and the name turned out to be appropriate. Maverick had a wild streak and a mind of her own, but she was ours, for better or worse. Unfortunately, in that early time, it turned out mostly to be for worse.

Past experience told me that it was within the normal range of puppy behavior to chew socks and shoes. But when I put the dog in the bedroom for ten minutes so I could talk to someone at the door, I returned to discover she’d chewed my down blanket and had begun stripping the wallpaper off the walls and gnawing at the edges of the carpet! Maverick wasn’t malicious, just anxious and high-strung beyond words. She was also affectionate and would, unbidden, sit on your lap and lick your ear all evening. She was, as Dmitry put it, a good dog with bad behavior.

There came a point in time, I shudder to admit, when in desperation, I considered, momentarily, trying to find her a new home. She seemed unmanageable. She jumped on elderly visitors; she ran wildly around the house; she destroyed anything that could be chewed. We tried crate training, but despite our best efforts, she was claustrophobic and shook uncontrollably and howled. We tried doggie obedience school, private training sessions, and discussions with the vet, who prescribed anti-anxiety meds short-term (for her, not me).

But Maverick remained a terror. I was at wit’s end. I was trying to manage the needs of two displaced kids, and the dog was receiving the lion’s share of my time.

“You can’t give her away,” my husband said flatly. “The kids will think they’re next. They think of her as a member of the family. They have to know we keep members of our family, even when they don’t behave.” He had a point. In my heart I believed he was right, but I was totally exhausted.

I hung in there, though. I kept my patience, threw away the destroyed items, and reassured the dog every chance I got. Gradually, her behavior calmed down.

One day, after things had settled down, when Dmitry and I were folding laundry together, Dmitry said, “Well, I guess no matter what Maverick does, she will always stay with us.”

“Yes, she will. After all, she’s ours.”

Then he furrowed his brow. “So you mean there’s nothing Maverick could do that would make us send her somewhere else?”

I thought about this for a minute. “Well, if she bit people we would have to do something different. We couldn’t allow her to hurt anyone,” I said, cautiously.

He nodded in agreement. “Oh, she would never do that. She has a good heart. She doesn’t want to hurt us.”

“That’s true,” I said.

A short time after that conversation a friend came to visit Dmitry. As he was showing the other child how to pat Maverick, the dog began running wildly around, grabbing things, and generally misbehaving.

Before I could intervene, Dmitry looked at the other child and said, “You know, you don’t have to be perfect to be in our family. You just have to not bite.”

— Ellie Porte Parker, Ph.D. —