Sunday, January 31, 2021
Managed to get some time off from taking care of Bean. He's currently sleeping in his crate right now. It's been an extremely tiring past week. There were a lot of ups and downs. He has so many tendencies of a stray dog and it's making me really frustrated. There are a lot of conflicting emotions. I admit, I had a very ideal picture painted out in my head when I thought about getting a dog.
Let me start on the good things first. How I envisioned having a dog was that he will be a good boy, lying next to me when I'm watching shows. Allowing me to bring him out for daily walks while responding to commands as I call out to him. I wanted a dog for company. The thing is I don't remember Autumn to be this difficult, and she really wasn't. I wanted a dog because I thought he will bring me joy.
Now, on to the bad things. It's gonna be significantly longer than the good. Reality is vastly different when I got Bean. He's extremely naughty! When my mum first brought him home, he was so scared of everything. He just sat quietly in one corner and was afraid when anyone approached him. 1 week later, he's so different. He's more familiar with us, with his environment and he's starting to get curious. That's good but it comes with many other undesirable tendencies. He's easily excited, overly excited and he bites too hard and it's causing us to bleed. He's peeing/pooping anywhere and that's okay, I expected this. But there's another thing, he's crying way too much for attention, or for things that he want. This is so damn irritating and it's causing me anxiety. At night before he sleeps, I made sure that all his needs are met. A few minutes after I leave, he starts crying and clawing at the door. He wakes up in the middle of the night to do this too and I haven't been sleeping well. I can't treat this as white noise either, it's way too loud and it goes on for 1hour. Imagine.. 2am to 3am, he makes it impossible to sleep. He really is so unlovable now.
I feel so tired and so frustrated. I don't know what I can do. I've been trying to train him and following tips given by dog trainers on youtube, reddit, forums. It's not really getting better. I've also been feeling anxiety. Whenever I get some down time and lie in bed, I hear him "crying" but when I walk over, he's fast asleep. I can't even nua properly these days. When my mum brought him home, I told myself I'll take full responsibility of him. So whenever he makes a mistake, I feel like I'm not good enough as a owner. Whenever mistakes are repeated, I feel so helpless because what I'm doing isn't working. It's so tough, so very tough. That's the difference between expectations and reality. I want an obedient dog, without understanding that they need to be trained before they can get there. There are certain things that will get better over time as they grow up, but it always pays to start training them young. Training them requires a lot of patience and repetition as well. It's very very tiring and not fun at all, but it's very necessary. In the past week, I've contemplated of sending him to a shelter. I wanted to give up, that's the easy thing to do. This year I've begun to feel contented with just meeting my friends a few times a week and that was enough for me. Now with Bean around, he made that difficult cos I have to tend to him. I don't like that, I still want to meet my friends for meals, to exercise, to hang out. If I did choose to send him to a shelter, does that mean I gave up and chose to take the easy way out? I don't want to do that. I still want to work towards Bean being an obedient dog. There will be times in the future when my friends won't have time for me and I know Bean will be there for me. Right now, I just want to see hope. Hope that Bean can one day be the obedient dog that I want.
Brian
12:14 PM
