Dog Stays in the Picture Read Online Free Page A

did not quite know what to make of him. Our family portrait was not looking exactly suburban.

    David, Eliza, Sam, and Ben, 1994
    Here the children were, just recovering from a natural disaster, supposedly safe, only to be possibly ripped from their parents and dumped in foster care ?!
    Mr. Child Protector turned out to be extremely good at his job, thank goodness. He talked to me and David, sniffed around our house a little, and took a few minutes alone with Eliza. Then he told us this was the most pleasant assignment he’d ever had (it was quite a novelty to evaluate a wholesome family for once, he said), and our slate was wiped clean as if nothing had ever happened.
    I ran into Eliza’s old teacher at the market some years later. We had a good talk, and I told her Eliza was happy in her new school, much more settled. She said things were a lot better for her students, too—they had replaced that creepy nun, their headmistress.
    The first weekend I ever dared leave our kids was the following year. David had been nominated for an award for The Crossing Guard ,and the producers flew me out to meet him in L.A. for the ceremony. I lined up the children’s favorite, most responsible sitter, an assistant DA paying off law school. Eliza had a really hard time going to bed the night before I left, so we did not get much sleep, and I was in a bit of a daze getting on the plane. There was heavy turbulence midflight—long periods of shaking, the hammering kind where lights flicker and flight attendants take to their seats. Like the improbable threat of earthquakes, turbulence BC had never bothered me much. But on that first solo flight since the kids were born, I sort of snapped: Who will take care of them if I crash?
    I know you’re not in any real danger in turbulence, but I simply could not get it together— Okay, so I’m not going to crash but what about the next time I have to fly with the kids and we have bumps like this and they are a little scared? What if I make it even worse because I am freaking out myself? We’ll never be able to visit David on location, the children will not have a relationship with their father, and he will divorce me because we never see each other, and basically the world as we know it is going to end because I can’t keep collected on a bumpy flight!
    I was so desperate I picked up the air phone under my tray table and called my mother, of all people. For once, I did not object when she suggested we recite the Lord’s Prayer together. (The woman sitting beside me, who did not seem even slightly alarmed by the bumping, acted as if nothing was happening.)
    I am not a prescription-drug-type person, but since then I’ve always flown with anxiety meds. They work! When the bumps start, all I am aware of is distant muffled screams—a lunatic lady locked in some secret, padded compartment deep inside my psyche, screeching and wailing. I feel completely at ease. I just smile sympathetically and think, Poor woman. So glad that’s not me.
    Another item I’d definitely have in my iPod for help with those acting preparations: the soundtrack of Mamma Mia!
    This is very serious stuff. I am about one-quarter Swedish, and I should know. Those ABBA Swedes have soul.
    Halfway through middle school I finally began to believe that Eliza had truly found her independence. The penny drop may have had something to do with the difference in protocol between lower and middle school. In lower school you could walk your child into homeroom, and most people did. Since homeroom drop-off was an option, there was no question: I was of course going to park the car and go in with my daughter. (If sitting in the classroom breast-feeding your eight-year-old on your lap all day had been an option, I would have seen it as my duty.) I never did get the hang of that lower-school drop-off technique, so when David was at home, that was his job, and he was a lot better than I was at