One last excerpt from Push Off from Here before it’s released into the wild next Tuesday, March 7. Please pre-order it if you haven’t already.
In her second year of her sobriety, my friend Sarah and her wife decided to adopt a rescue dog. It’s something they’d talked about doing for years, but as the second winter of the pandemic started to approach and Sarah’s depression began to worsen, they felt like it was the right time. Sarah had dogs growing up and yearned for the comfort and emotional support she remembered. She imagined long hikes through the Connecticut woods, snuggles on the couch, and a playmate for their son.
After months of consideration and searching, and then more months of waiting until he gained enough weight to come home, they got Bishop. I am a sucker for dogs as it is, but the first time I saw a picture of Bishop my heart exploded. He was all length and legs, like a newborn deer in a German shepherd / husky / mutt body. Everything about him was long: his nose, his body, his legs, his tail. The expression in his eyes is the one so many dogs have. It says, Please forgive me; I just want to love you.
A day or two after they got him, they started to Google symptoms of a lingering cough that he’d had since the shelter took him in. They also noticed he wheezed all the time and didn’t have much capacity for exercise. As Sarah said, “He sounded like an eighty-year-old lifetime smoker.” They both had the intuitive sense that something was wrong with him, beyond what they already knew from the adoption facility.
They continued to monitor him and carried on. As is normal with a puppy, their routines were turned upside down in those first weeks, but then Sarah got COVID and was laid up for a few weeks. In addition, her depression worsened to a degree she had never experienced before. They both started to feel like maybe it was all too much, but they hoped to find an equilibrium.
When they took Bishop to his first vet visit they learned he had something called laryngeal paralysis, which caused his air passage to be extremely small. It’s something that’s common in older dogs, but rare in puppies. They were relieved there was an explanation for his wheezing and low tolerance for exercise, and they could now focus on fixing the problem.
“There was this feeling that we just needed to get to a solution, and then he’d be the dog he was supposed to be—the dog we signed up for,” said Sarah.
After learning about their options, they decided on a surgery that would open his airway and had a high rate of success. After the surgery, Sarah and her wife thought they noticed his breathing sounded a little different, but not for long—the wheeze was still there. When her wife left for a trip with their son, Sarah took Bishop for a walk and realized he sounded exactly the same. She took him to the ER, called the surgeon, and it was determined that the surgery didn’t work. When Sarah brought him back home that night, she went for a walk with him in the woods, and found herself shouting up at the sky, “This is not what I wanted!”
“I’m embarrassed to admit it,” she says. “But that’s where I was; that’s how I felt.”
“Our expectations were one thing, and he turned out to be another, and we couldn’t figure out why,” she said. “We kept asking ourselves, Is this karma? Is it bad luck? Are we doing something wrong? What is going on here?”
When Sarah’s wife returned from their trip, the two spent the morning talking about what to do. Both of them assumed that the next step was to put Bishop down. They talked about how to break the news to their son. “We were both talking like it had already happened and we just had to get through it.”
Then they had a conversation with the surgeon. He said he could perform the surgery again, but that it wasn’t likely to be successful. He said they could, of course, put him down, but they could also give him as good of a life as possible, knowing he had this condition and wouldn’t live a full life, or a long one. He said, “Listen, you have a sweet, healthy, wonderful dog whose parts don’t work. You have a sweet little lemon.”
Sarah says during the conversation her internal world started shifting. She realized they weren’t going to put him down, and they weren’t going to have another surgery either. A different thing was happening.
“I felt terrible that we’d been so sure that we’d put him down, but that’s where I was—that’s where we were.”
After the call with the surgeon, she says her “duty” part showed up first. She went to the kitchen and started looking at what they needed more of: dog food, poop bags, chew toys. “I thought, Fine. this is our responsibility, and we’ll do it.”
But then she went and sat on the couch with her wife in the living room. Bishop was sitting on the floor next to them resting.
“I don’t know why, or what happened, but I suddenly felt like I needed to get down on the floor with him,” Sarah recounts. “So I did. I put my face next to his and looked in his face and I said, ‘Okay.’”
She kept saying it, okay.
Bishop put his paws on her neck and opened his legs for a belly scratch as she repeated it again and again: Okay . . . okay . . . okay.
When I asked her why she said okay and what she was saying okay to, she said she didn’t know why it came out of her, it wasn’t conscious, that it came from her body, her heart.
“I was saying Okay to him as he was. Okay to what was happening instead of what I wanted to happen. Okay to him not being what we’d expected. Okay to him being the dog that he is. Okay to it all.”
She says it was the most visceral experience of acceptance she’s ever had. “It was a hundred and eighty degrees all at once. Like part of me took a back seat and another part of me stepped forward. And since then, everything with him has been different. I’m open to him, I feel bonded to him.”
When Sarah told me this story, knowing her history and what she’d gone through in her two years of sobriety, I smiled, thinking, Who was accepting who down there on the floor?
When I asked her if she thinks the experience would have been different if she’d not been sober, she said, “Entirely.” She said she wouldn’t have been able to tell the truth about how she felt from the beginning because she wouldn’t have allowed herself to hear it or feel it, if she even had access to it in the first place. “It would have been too hard to feel that, and I was so disconnected from myself. My drinking was all about not being able to be with what was happening, internally or externally. And so, when it came time, I wouldn’t have really accepted anything because I wouldn’t have had to burn through my feelings of disappointment, frustration, resentment to arrive there.”
This point—the link between acceptance and the truth and, ultimately, love—is so vital, so important. Acceptance doesn’t happen without the truth because the truth is what one has to accept. As psychologist Carl Rogers observed, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” which could be broadened to say that when we accept life as it is—that is, accept the truth—then we can change. If Bishop had been exactly the dog Sarah was hoping for, there would be nothing to accept. If we got exactly the life we hoped for and people behaved exactly like we wanted them to at all times, there would be nothing to accept. If sobriety came easy, there would be nothing to accept. Although we often think we’d like life to be this way—easy-peasy, no problems to solve, everything goes our way—we really wouldn’t. A life without challenge is not only boring; it’s meaningless.
That moment on the floor with Bishop and Sarah exemplifies the gift of acceptance. It’s not as though anything actually changed in that moment—Bishop wasn’t magically healed and Sarah’s heart was still broken—but she was able to hold these things differently: with grace, and a lightness that wasn’t there before. When we find acceptance, our problems are still there; they just sting less. We are still who we are, with all our mistakes and pain, but we can somehow bear those mistakes and pain more easily.
Acceptance itself is the single-word incantation of okay. Repeated again, and again, and again, we slowly fall into the decision and the allowance, the stepping forward and the letting go, the catch and the release, until we are at rest, at ease, at home.
—Excerpted from Push Off from Here, coming March 7. Copyright Laura McKowen / Random House.
This excerpt comes from Chapter 8: You are loved. Sarah is a real person, a dear friend, and I’m so grateful she let me use this story in the book. Acceptance is one of those concepts that’s near-impossible to capture. I always think of
's line in Tiny Beautiful Things, "Acceptance is a small, quiet room," which has always felt like the most apt description: the quiet, internal nature of it; the invisible surrender.I was stuck on this chapter for a while—on how best to convey acceptance as an act of love, and then Sarah told me this story, this incantation of Okay, and I knew that was it. One of the best parts about writing Push Off was that I got to use so many stories from others. All the stories in the book are real, and nearly all the names used are the real names of important people in my life: TLC team members, friends, and folks I’ve crossed paths with in recovery. When T read the book on our recent trip, he looked up from it at one point with tears in his eyes and said, “Bishop,” and I said, “Yeah.”
This is the last excerpt I’ll be sharing as the book comes out on Tuesday (!). It’s been fun sharing bits of it with you prior to release. Also, I searched and searched for a Taylor Swift lyric that captured the essence of this one, and I couldn’t. Some will just be like that, but I’m sticking with the project, and when I start turning toward the topics of love addiction, codependency, relationship drama, and heartache—oh, she’s got me covered.
Love,
Laura
Push Off drops in 4 days. Pre-order it now, and save your receipt to get access to the launch party with my hilarious and wonderful friend, author, and host of Terrible, Thanks for Asking Nora McInerny.
I detailed all the book launch and book tour events here:
Okay, okay, okay.
I recently accepted a tough reality regarding my parents health and finances. I’d been working really hard for a year to “fix” their situation. I was throwing control at it, a “fix” I’ve used in many areas of my life. The clarity finally came to me and I thought, “This is not going to get better.” It doesn’t feel great but it does feel real. Looking forward to the book- thank you for this 🙏🫶
"One single thread of gold tied me to you" immediately came to mind when reading this. I think the song is titled Invisible Strings, or something along those lines.
I love this post. I can't wait to read the new book and feel all the emotions I felt reading the first book this week. Thank you for your words.