(an excerpt from The Life and Times of a New Mommy—as told by the Recent Paterfamilias—per an anecdote related by the New Mommy while on a film set for which she had been propping during the month of August, 2011)
“I sometimes feel bad for the two of them, my daughter and my dog. I mean, he [the Recent Paterfamilias] is fantastic with her, he really is, and with the dog, too, of course, but it’s just that, he’s not…how should I say it…he’s not in possession of endless reserves of patience. I don’t mean to say that I’m the better parent. It’s just that…well…it’s just that I have more patience than he does…with the baby, and with the dog, and with them together. So I feel sorry for the two of them, the baby and the dog. He doesn’t mean to be impatient. It’s only that he...well, I don’t know how to say it without seeming like a bad person…”
[Cut to: the following day on set; the New Mommy is speaking with the same crew members to which she had been speaking the day before during yet another lull in the day’s shooting schedule]
“Remember what I was saying yesterday? About my husband’s whole lack of patience? Well, when I got home this morning [the film was shooting “nights,” and was thusly “night dependent,” which resulted in crew members reaching their respective domiciles sometime after daybreak], I thought I’d do the right thing and run the dog out. He [the R.P.] and the baby were still asleep. I felt bad for the dog as he usually gets the short end of the stick now that the baby’s here, plus, he’s got to deal with [R.P.’s] temper, so I ran him out.
“Well, after five or six minutes outside, I found myself screaming at the damn dog, in public, on the sidewalk, with all these people looking at me, people going to the gym and to work, and then here I am, yelling in a loud voice, ‘You have to stop behaving like a f----ing idiot!’”
“What was he doing?” a camera operator who’d been a part of the conversation asked.
“He was trying to attack a street sweeper.”
“A what?”
“A street sweeper.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
The end.
[It would appear that the combination of a human infant, several consecutive long workdays, and a dependably ill-behaved, and willfully disobedient, canine can ultimately exhaust the patience of even the most tolerant soul upon the face of the earth, which, frankly, should cause the remainder of us who find ourselves in this life lacking in such unplumbable reserves of understanding, compassion, and empathy to consider ourselves fortunate that there are others out there who are willing and able to step in and pick up our slack, should we shuffle and stumble and lose what is left of our, admittedly, limited allowances of patience.]
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