Maybe it’s more like walking around with my insides on my outside, and my flesh and bones and organs clanking noticeably as I walk around, like wares swinging on the flanks of a pack mule. You bruise easily when you walk around like that, so I’m more wary and jumpy. I also want to beat the crap out of somebody.

Chile is dying. And I’m so sad about my boy, but I’m also angry and exhausted along with the worry and fear and sense that I’m perpetually overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the sheer hours spent at the hospital this week, the convoluted conversations with specialists that I struggle to comprehend, getting right the dosage of the half-dozen medications that he’s prescribed.

Exhausted because I don’t sleep well – never knowing whether he’ll still be here when I wake up. I approach his still body quietly each morning, waiting to notice the rise and fall of his red furry chest before I exhale my own sigh of relief that he’s still with us.

And I’m angry: Angry because I feel so helpless to do anything at all to make him breathe more easily and rest without panting, like he did only a day or two ago. It feels excruciatingly unbearable to sit around and do nothing to help him, but instead to go on as usual — to go to work and show up at meetings and answer some emails and toss some laundry in the machine and hear about my daughter’s school day and think about planting those tomato seedlings in a pot on the deck….

Part of me feels slightly crazy and desperate when the vet gives me the latest update on his condition – like I want to shake her thin shoulders until her kind eyes loll around in her head, commanding, “FIX HIM!” But my rational side knows better, and it shushes that inner freak to focus on what we’re dealing with here, and to listen closely for the subtext, which I don’t want to miss. I have to be sure to hear the part when she’ll answer the unspoken question: “Will he get better?”

And I’m angry because I’m feeling gypped out of more time with him – he’s only 9, he’ll be 10 in August (if he makes it is what that inner crazy person just said pointedly). Nine isn’t unreasonable for a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. But it isn’t reasonable, either. No time ever is long enough, when you are talking about someone you love.

Are you thinking – even a little bit – he’s just a dog? Yeah, he is a dog. But not “just.” Chile has been with me the longest; longer than the other three dogs in our house. I would like to use this paragraph to relay some amazing anecdote about his life, to recall his fearlessness in the face of tragedy and recount the courageous way he led a child through a burning building to safety, the smoke searing his own brave lungs. His demise should be trending on Twitter.

But of course the truth is anything but that: He was a difficult little dog; we called him “complex.” He was riddled with anxiety and fears. He saw shadows where there were none. He was ridiculously picky with food. He had bad teeth. He was afraid of thunder and swimming pools. He didn’t warm up to most people; he barked through the fence at the neighbors. He was an asshole to other dogs.

In other words, he lived an ordinary life, like most of us. He loved his walks. He chased seagulls on the beach — running like a lunatic through the muddy surf, his eyes full of expectation that maybe he might bag one this time. (He never did.) Later, he would roll in the sand and emerge looking breaded, like a cutlet. He made his body boneless and cozy when he pressed it into mine on cold nights. He followed the conversation, shifting his big brown gaze from person to person as they spoke, in a way that made him look weirdly human. I guess he was nothing special. But he was extraordinary.

Was. I just realized I’m using the past tense.

He’s not gone yet. But if I’m being honest with myself — much as it pisses me off to be — I know he won’t be with us much longer. If he manages to squeak through this crisis (inner crazy person: Shut up! He will! Goddamit!), how long before the next? Or the next after that? His body is compromised; it’s a matter of time before he’s too tired to rally; too weak to try.

And so this is the place where I’ve been before – and where you’ve maybe been, too, if you’ve buried someone you love, because every death reminds you of other deaths. It’s not quite a march toward the end but a roller coaster of ups and down, with the peaks a little flatter each time, while the depths drop a little steeper.

Does it seem weird to compare a dog to a human, possibly? And if so, why?

The truth is that Chile is connecting me to my own past – to the loss of my father, my mother, and even my own son. There is no hierarchy here, that exalts the demise of one kind of being and dismisses the other. They are all souls who’ve been loved. I’ve made decisions about Chile that I’ve never had to make for a human: Should we try to make him better? (Yes.) Even if it costs money? (Yes.) What if he needs another echo-cardiogram? (So?) Will you pay for that? (Yes.) In that way, I’m forced to give my love for Chile a dollar value — a bottom line, so to speak — in the way we humans rarely are called to do for one another.

How much would you give to fix him? I would give what I could, because that’s what you do for love.

When my father died, it was a weekday, and the mail came as usual. I was in high school, and I remember I was surprised by the mail truck: How could the world go on, when such a tremendous thing had happened? Didn’t they know? Someone I loved had died, and the world would never be the same. Why is it that the world is the same for everyone else? That’s crazy and egocentric, of course, but that’s what grief (and teen-hood) will do.

Decades later, I’m there again, wondering how the world can tick on, and business can get done, when nothing is the same. At the vet, they’re doing all they can. I kiss Chile goodnight on the top of his little red head and I tell him: You’ll be okay. Love you, you knucklehead. See you tomorrow. I don’t want to go, but I have to.

Meanwhile, my parts are on the outside, aching. There’s a little bit of crazy, inside. I want to punch somebody. I want to climb into the cage and never leave my weird little boy. Or one better: I want to watch him tackle the beach and run at top-speed down the hard sand, and remember how it feels – maybe just one more time – when my heart fills with his joy.

Chile died the morning of July 3rd. I wrote this piece three weeks ago, in the midst of Chile’s treatments for one of two major illnesses. Despite his medical issues, Chile’s last few weeks were happy. He died peacefully, beside me, at our house in Maine, his favorite place on earth.

It’s £16 for an adult admission for me and my friend Beccy, and another £6 for each of the three children with us. In total, that’s £32 + £18, or £50.

But then I notice an alternative: The family rate for 2 adults and one child is £32, plus £6 for each additional child. Or, in our case, £44, in total. That saves us £6 in admission—roughly $10 US.

At the time of our trip (late winter of 2011) each US dollar is worth about half of every British pound. So a large Coke that should be $2.50 is five bucks, easy. It felt like I paid the equivalent of a day’s salary for lunch one day. In other words, considering the punishing exchange rate we’ve endured at shops and pubs across London this week, the family rate feels like a deal we somehow deserve.

I wrestle with the moral dilemma for a moment, breathing in that pure Christian air at the Abbey: Is it unsavory to pretend to be what we are not in that rarified place? The kind of family with two moms who love each other, spending school vacation with their three teens, seeing the sites in London? More than just friends… but a whole family? A unit?

A woman in line in front of us totes a canvas bag emblazoned in ink with, “WWJD?” Yeah — What would Jesus do?

I think back to the bible story of the loaves and fishes. How Jesus, after he crossed the Sea of Galilee—distraught over the death of John the Baptist at the hand of King Herod—nevertheless seized an opportunity at hand when he took a couple of loaves of bread and a few meager fish and multiplied them to feed thousands.

Jesus might not have been one for lying. But something in that story tells me that he had a keen understanding of opportunity, and the occasional need to stretch a buck.

I glance at Beccy, and suddenly the friend I’ve known for most of my adult life starts to take on a new interest for me. Maybe it was the way the gray London mist settled in her hair, forming in a kind of halo of curls around her face—I never noticed the flip of her hair before. Or maybe it was the she held the door ajar for those snaking behind us and carefully folded her umbrella up so as not to drip on the folks in line near us: Has she always been so thoughtful?

But I decided right there, right then: We needed to give this union a go.

It’s our turn at the counter. “How many?” the cashier asks, her voice muffled by the glass. “Family rate,” I say in response, in the same sure tone as a confident groom answers the minister.

She glanced up at us and paused, her hands poised over the cash register. “Where?” she asked. Impulsively I pulled Beccy close and gestured vaguely to the three teens behind us. They stood there, crammed together in that stone vestibule with a kind of embarrassed incredulity on their faces.

Well that surprised me. You’d think—growing up as they have—that they’d be used to occasional stares and challenges to our way of life.

The clerk gives us a bored look and shrugs. “£44,” she says. And the next thing I know, we’re inside, collecting our audio handsets that would guide us through this ancient Abbey, past the grave of Chaucer, and Dickens, and 17 monarchs who have ruled England for the past thousand years.

I could argue that Beccy—perhaps more than most people in my life—is indeed akin to family. She’s been by me for… what is it now? 24 years? And we’ve coached each other through breakups and babies and all the mud that life slings at you.

She’s hugged me when I’ve been hurting; she’s seen me drink too much and live to regret it; she’s baked me casseroles. We trade books to read and we read them on the beach, side by side in low-slung chairs.

She’s watched my children grow up alongside her own and she knows that my son’s favorite product in the whole world is duct tape and that my daughter won’t eat the beans in the chili.

I think of all this, and a thousand more inconsequential things that all together come together into something that defines a friendship rolling through decades. And I wonder: So if that’s not a partner… well, what is?

* * *

It’s inevitable that the blush of new love fades. And that’s something like what happened at the Abbey that day, too.

Because once inside, Beccy inexplicably became just, well, Beccy: just a friend, albeit a good friend. In fact, the kind of friend I’d do anything for: beg, steal, lie and cheat.

I flipped on the audio for the first stop, up ahead, on the self-guided Abbey tour, and I tried to ignore the fact that perhaps that’s exactly what I had just done.

1. Preference to remain someplace safe

2. Include something special in the bowl — preferably on top of, not UNDERNEATH (!!) — the kibble. Sausage will do (see sausage comment, above), as will turkey, cheese, chicken, ham, or almost any kind of food preferred by the French. Foods to avoid: Eggs (blech!), lamb (not sure why, I just don’t like the idea of it, I guess), and any kind of vegetable, although clearly this should go without saying. Also, bear in mind that not all dogs like liver and other organ meats, and this includes me. I’d rather have a dry, flaky coat.

3. Kibble should measure less than one-eighth of an inch (1/8) in circumference, or slightly larger than the head of a pin. Not a pushpin, either, but a common pin.

4. Don’t even think about one of those metal bowls. If you wore a collar and your tag dinged the rim (it sounds like Notre Dame!), you’d freak out, too!

5. Please place all other dogs out of my eyesight, as prescribed: Simon behind the laundry room door, Abby behind kitchen island (far side), Maisy completely out of my space (porch or outside in the yard preferred, even in winter). Can’t stand the way they eyeball my bowl, the little Hoovers. And Maisy is just scary. Are you sure she’s a Labrador? I’m thinking wolf.

6. Place bowl at exactly the following coordinates on the runner in front of the kitchen sink: Long.:41.80926461539462; Lat.: -71.0980224609375

7. No touching or petting, please. However, some soothing words of encouragement can help aid the process. Suggested script, “Good dog, Chile!” “It’s ok, you’re a good boy!” “Come on now, little boy… you can eat now. You’re safe.” “Yum… isn’t that good? There you go!” “Yeeeeesss… there’s my little man. Good boy.”

8. Shouting things like “Fercrissake Chile! EAT!!” and “WTF is WRONG WITH YOU!! EAT!!” is not productive. Also, they are hurtful.

9. Repeat #7 for as long as necessary. We could be here a while.

10. Wait for me to be done.

11. Still waiting.

12. Number 7 again, please. And can you use a softer voice?

13. OK, it’s all good. Release the others from their designated holding positions. K, thanks! See you tonight!

* Let the record be shown that Chile prefers “complex” to “fussy,” which he terms “pejorative.”

He’s freighted with two pairs of shoes, extra clothes that didn’t fit in the duffel, three sketchbooks, a camera, drawing pencils, a couple of books, a rent deposit for next fall, and film in a protective lead case.

My arms are empty, but I’m carrying an uncontainable mix of baby boy joy; the sweet smells of childhood; and cruddy, exhausting, hilarious teenage agonies freshly capped with some annoyance from this morning, when he insisted he was ready to go when most of what’s now stuffed in those two bags was still roaming the house, itinerant. This he shouted over his shoulder at me as he scurried to retrieve it.

Headed down to security, he’s forgotten all that. He doesn’t carry any of that with him, because his head is full of where he’s going, not what’s already behind him. He has 50 pounds strapped to his body, but he steps as lightly as a lamb.

I love the way he never looks back. In part because he’s already gone.

I’ve noticed an abundance of these stories lately — including one a few weeks back in the NY Times, Students, Welcome to College; Parents, Go Home — perhaps because my own freshman son is freshly deposited in Baltimore, at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

I understand the entertainment value of mocking these hyper-controlling “Velcro parents” who have a hard time letting go. Anecdotes abound of parents out of control — like the mother who camped out in her daughter’s dorm room to help the “transition” to college.

Even less kooky stories are popping up: At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, incoming freshmen view a video with their smiling, crying parents waving a collective goodbye. First-year students at the University of Chicago have a new ritual in which they walk their parents to the university gate as bagpipes swell with (presumably) a wailing, farewell tune. Morehouse College does something similar, and the gates swing shut behind them. The University of Minnesota says it sneakily invites Moms and Dads to a parent reception during check-in, as if the parents are toddlers in need of distraction from their meddling. And at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business in Philadelphia, a goodbye reception includes an unofficial “crying room,” set up with tissues and a counselor.

The not-so-subtle message here is, of course, Parents: Get out. Let go. Back off. Get a life. And let your kids have one, too, will you?

Perhaps it’s just me, but that message strikes me as a little discordant, and even a little unfair. As MSNBC points out, we live in a culture where parents are practically required to orchestrate the lives of their kids — or as least be intimately involved. Partly that’s because kids are more scheduled today that even before. Partly it’s because technology enables immediacy and connectivity — I’m talking about cell phones and Skype and texting and the like. But fundamentally it’s because we parents are more involved as parents; we take our jobs seriously, every step of the way. For better or for worse.

You might be tempted to argue whether that involvement is a good thing or a bad thing. You could say that the ambitions and the neediness of parents is to blame — who doesn’t know someone who has made a career out of managing her child’s life, to an annoying degree? But that’s an issue for another day. The reality is that, for most of us, our involvement is expected and encouraged, subtly and sometimes, not-so-subtly. The backbone of so many programs that enrich our kids is the volunteer organizing and/or financial support of parents. At the local level, that’s the Little League team and soccer programs and the like. But more than that, too: Regional dance teams, summer arts programs, robotics camps, or whatever it is that excites your kid. All the way through childhood.

That’s always been the case, perhaps — volunteer parent-coaches have always been the backbone of local sports programs, for example — but the stakes are higher now: Sports tournaments that require families to pack up and drive hours to a weekend event, including hotel overnights, aren’t unusual. Did most of our parents participate at that level? Did we? Did your school ever participate in a sports tournament in Georgia, funded by parents, as my own son did? Did your middle school organize class trips to NYC, funded by parents? Did your mom ever drive you to dance school 5 nights out of every week, and would she have been expected to help with fundraising for the Performance Team?

For better or worse, that’s the culture we live in. Parents who don’t step up are slackers. Although most of us do it all. Gladly. And institutions and organizations, for the record, also gladly play into that, driving it and exploiting it. (Although maybe exploiting is too harsh a word. At the very least, they capitalize on it. And continue to develop and entrench it as part of the ritual of parenting.)

Colleges play the game of involving parents, too: It seemed that half the marketing MICA did was directed at us parents, enticing us to realize how awesome their art school is. (And, for the record, it is.) Parents have the money and thus control the decisions; so it makes sense that institutions all through a child’s life are increasingly looking for parent support and involvement.

So the discord for me comes in when articles like this — and some colleges themselves — make such a spectacle of “cutting the cord,” telling us to “go home” so our kids can bloom. Setting up things like formal goodbyes at the gates and “crying rooms” seem inconsistent with how we (as parents) are supposed to… well, parent. We have a lifetime of encouraged involvement in our kids lives, and then we are supposed to do as our parents did? Just say goodbye, already, and quit your crying? Don’t let the door hit you in the ass?

I’m not suggesting hovering is the answer. In fact, we do need to go home. And almost two weeks ago, I did, leaving my thrilled son behind.

But this isn’t about me; rather, it’s about how there seems to be something missing in the news coverage, a nuance that fails to recognize the complexity that defines parenting today. An acknowledgment that we’ve raised our kids differently, for better or worse. And a lack of recognition on the part of institutions that gladly exploit that involvement to their benefit, and then roll their eyes at these sappy parents after the check is cashed.

In other words, the point isn’t that parents these days have “issues.” The point is that our society supports and encourages parents to be more involved than ever for the first 18 years of a child’s life, and then mocks them when that inevitable drop-off day comes, and we can’t drop them with quite the same finality our own parents might have. So then? Parents come off badly. Over-involved “Velcro-parents,” desperately in need of a life.

But the reality is much more nuanced than that, isn’t it? It’s the parents who come off badly, when the entire culture is really what’s to blame.

That is, if blame is even the right word.

Planned for early December release, Content Rules is a how-to guide to creating compelling content for the Web. The talented and fun CC Chapman is co-author (David Meerman Scott is writing the foreword), and together we’ll answer questions like, How can you create so-called bold stories and videos and blog posts that will inspire people? How do you develop ideas that will arouse passion for your products or services? How can you cultivate fans? How can your ideas ignite your business?

Any organization with a website is a publisher, right? So Content Rules applies to organizations of all sizes and stripes, whether you are a Fortune 500 corporation or a mom-and-pop on the corner, or anything in between: hospital, entrepreneur, nonprofit, sole practitioner or consultant, artist, government agency, church, school, political candidate, sports team, community group, marching band, butcher, baker or candlestick maker.

I’m excited about this project, because for me it represents a mashup of so many things that thrill me: Creating stuff people love. Building a community around an organization. Online tools. Good writing. (And, by the way, it also allows me to slay (or at least shame!) some demons that have long plagued my world: Like corporate Frankenspeak. Uninspired blogs. Boring craptastical content. Stuff that sucks.)

I’d be thrilled if you pre-order Content Rules now, or wait until it’s out this December.

Also, check out our brand-spanking-new blog and site, and (bonus!) watch me embarrass myself in the video.

I’m freshly back from the theater after seeing Toy Story 3, which prompts me to ask: A G-rating? Seriously? I haven’t been this disturbed since the Turkish prison scenes in Midnight Express (which was rated R, by the way).

The first two Toy Story movies centered on the happy relationship between a young boy named Andy and his toys. In Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3, Andy is packing for college, and the story leaves the toys to fend for themselves in a world where there’s no longer anyone to care for them.

It’s not that the movie was mis-rated. Devoid of sex or gore, it is a kid’s movie. Technically.

But what it stirs up in movie-goers is anything but juvenile: Essentially abandoned by a grown-up Andy, it’s up to the desperate, panicked toys to find not just a new home, but a way to recapture their raison d’etre : The simple joy and richness of being loved best by a child.

The unspoken premise is this: Nothing lasts forever, and in the end you’re either the deserted or the one deserting. (Also: because this is a kid’s movie, Pixar tosses us a bone: Don’t fret too much; you’ll eventually find someone else who is almost as good as the original. But it’ll be hell – hell! — getting there.)

So, Motion Picture Association, you could have warned me. Toy Story 3 is tragically under-rated — in the sense of sketchily explained, resulting in a whole audience of popcorn-munching Americans who will suddenly be caught off guard for that scene when Woody, Buzz, Ham, and the rest of the toys — trapped on a garbage incinerator’s conveyor belt — hold hands in heartbreaking resignation as they brave a certain fiery death, and in that moment you forget that they are not just toys but cartoon toys, and you bawl like a baby at the desperate humanity laid bare on their digital faces.

And that was just one scene of several: The scene where Woody leaves for college….? The mix of wisdom and acceptance that flickers across the faces of the toys as they watch him drive off down the road, which signals a silent acknowledgment about the nothing-lasts-forever bit? It will destroy you. Unless you are made of stone.

I’ve admittedly been in a melancholy mood lately, what with the fledgling kid about to take flight and the situation with the one-eyed dog. So maybe it’s just me. But I don’t think so. As the credits rolled, only a few people (possibly robots) jumped up and made their way immediately to the exit, instead of taking what the rest of us needed, and had earned: a sensible few minutes to pat our faces dry and collect ourselves before shuffling out.

Then as we left the theater, my daughter — who tends to sprout hives when she’s really upset — could manage to only scratch broodingly and shake her head no at me when I asked her what she thought. My son said simply, “Why did we have to see that?” in a ponderous tone. He sunk into silence for the rest of the car ride home, no doubt remembering his previously carefree existence. And by “previously” I mean like 2 hours before, when the frailty of us all wasn’t quite so palpable.

When my daughter was younger, she’d self-police her entertainment options. A grade school friend would call and invite her to a matinee, and she’d say, “Sorry. But that movie has mild thematic elements. How about we see…?” And then she’d name another film more in line with her middle-aged sensibilities. She picked that up from reading the cautionary footnotes your association uses to elucidate and rate a film’s content suitability for certain audiences. (Like: “May be too intense for younger audiences” or “Contains mild thematic elements not appropriate for younger viewers.”)

So I’m thinking that some films could carry similar cautionary footnotes to a prescribed rating, because frankly, I could have used an elucidating footnote prior to the movie today. On Toy Story 3, for example, you might consider: “Caution: Contains mild thematic elements not appropriate for older viewers.” Or: “May be too intense: The sensitive and overwrought strongly cautioned.” Or perhaps: “Attention parents of graduating seniors: You might want to skip this one and go straight to dinner instead.”

Pixar is long overdue for this kind of action, in fact. The last animated film that similarly unhinged me was also a Pixar flick; specifically, the “Married Life” montage from Up. Haven’t seen it? Let me summarize: Two adorable kids marry with dreams of a life together, then eventually things don’t work out exactly the way they envisioned, and one of them ends up sad and alone.

Which leads to the inevitable question: Is that a cartoon – or is that life?

Thanks for your consideration.

“Lost” is a funny term for it—implying that she misplaced it somewhere and can’t for the life of her remember where, like you might car keys. Maybe, in time, “lost” will be enough to define the visceral brutality of what happened. But not quite yet.

Then again, I’m not entirely sure what happened, exactly. I do know this much, in the way that your mind tills over and over the details leading up to a terrible thing, as if to search for clues that things were about to be altered forever: My daughter Caroline and I were in the backyard. I was combing the surface of a new garden with a steel rake. Abby and her canine sister, Maisy, were with us, too, roaming—as they often do—amid a thick bed of flowers and ferns some 50 feet away. Abby stands only about a foot tall from her shoulder to her paws: When she’s in the garden it swallows her whole. Rabbits and chipmunks and voles and other small creatures take refuge in that garden, and Abby and Maisy track their punky smells, noses to the ground.

Abby is a rescue dog who came to live with us just shy of her first birthday: First as a foster, and then later as a permanent part of the family. She is the kind of dog you like even when you don’t like dogs: She is gentle and meek around people, and she melts the disinterested shell right off of strangers, who can’t help but bend down to pet her as she sidles up to them; “Aww, aren’t you a good girl?” they’ll say. “Yes,” I always respond. “She’s something special.”

She seems to know, intuitively, which people are most in need of a dose of her, and those are the ones that she parks herself in front of, gently pawing the air before them, as if she’s waving a small peace flag, her soulful human eyes seeking theirs.

You can see how, if you do like dogs, a dog like Abby would grow like a wild vine around your heart, wrapping herself around your organs until after a while your hearts together beat in wordless understanding. I’ve had sweet dogs before. But what makes Abby uniquely rooted in my heart is that soulful intellect cross-wired with a spunky streak. It’s a lively bit of pluck that Vahe calls charajiji, using the Armenian to describe a kind of naughty impishness. That’s what drives her sense of fun and adventure that—the first time I set eyes on her—had her strolling the back of the sofa like a cat, as if she owned the place. (She didn’t.) And today, almost six years later, still sends her swooping and diving at tennis balls around the dining room table, and running at top speed to scatter flocks of gulls on the beach. It’s what has her stalking chipmunks now in the garden.

From the new garden nearby, I see only the tops of the flowers swaying in huffy complaint as Abby and Maisy tramp through. It went on for the better part of the humid June afternoon: Maisy and Abby patrolled. I raked. At one point I watched the dogs for a minute, leaning on my rake, and mused to Caroline: “It’s funny, isn’t it, the way that the girls in our family are the motivated ones?” Our two male dogs, Chile and Simon, were splayed on the cool tile indoors; Caroline’s brother, Evan, was inside, too, himself splayed on the sofa.

Suddenly I heard a quick, decisive growl. Maisy. It’s the sound she makes when she’s been startled or agitated by something. I guessed Maisy had cornered a terrified little critter, and I pictured a frantic little paw swiping at Maisy’s big black snout nosing beyond the lip of a burrow.

“Maisy!” I yelled. “Abby! Come!” Maisy came trotting out of the thicket right away, but Abby is not as easily deterred from prey. Charajiji. I headed toward the garden, calling her name again, a little impatiently. “God I hope it’s not a bunny…” I said to Caroline. Suddenly Abby popped out of the brush.

There’s that moment when you look at something so unexpected, so surprising, so shocking, that your brain can’t quite compute what it is, exactly, you are looking at. With Abby trotting toward me, I looked only long enough to work out what I was actually looking at: which was her right eye hanging out of its socket, like some Halloween zombie display at a party goods store, bobbing with every step she took.

I guess I should feel lucky to say that it was the singularly most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen, but yesterday it didn’t feel that way. Instead, I felt not just revolted but inexplicably terrified, and much as I’m not proud of it now, I screamed and turned away from poor Abby and ran full-tilt into the house, Caroline at my heels, bolting the door behind us, blinking in the cool air and hoping the gruesome visage of our beloved little dog would somehow adjust itself back to its proper order.

Why, exactly? What was so scary? Did I think it wasn’t really her? That instead she’d been twisted into something bizarre and dangerous? Did I think her freakishly exposed eyeball was going to sprout legs and chase me down? I have no explanation for my response: Animals react to threats with a primal discharge of the nervous system, priming the animal to fight or for flight. Clearly, my primal neurons instructed me to flee.

But poor sweet Abby! If she was in pain, she didn’t seem it. She trotted after us, waiting to be let in first by one door and then the other, and seemingly unaware of the chaos, the screaming. It was the boy on the couch who sprang into action, swaddling Abby in a beach towel and depositing her in my arms, where I held her close and cooed to her as the boy sped—with no license and no shoes, I realized later—to the emergency vet clinic a few miles away. By then, in me, another primal urge had taken over: To fix, to care for, to squeeze every drop of essence from my own body and pour it into hers, willing it into her as she sat panting on my lap, the towel around her head. The boy stood with me at the clinic, his size 10 feet shoved into a pair of his sister’s silver flip-flops he had foraged from the back seat of the car.

They couldn’t save the eye. It turns out she was already blind as she emerged from the garden, even as she was trotting after us. I don’t know exactly what the stringy bits are called that attach an eyeball to its socket, but whatever they are, hers included an optic nerve that was severed in the accident.

There was a small puncture wound above where her eye was; the vet presumes that a larger animal bit her in the face, and happened to catch her just so, causing her eye to shoot out like a pinball from its coil spring. It might have been Maisy, who perhaps snapped to warn her away from a critter hole she wanted for herself; it might have been another larger animal lurking in the brush.

We picked Abby up early this morning from the clinic. I know she’ll recover quickly and adapt; I’ve seen plenty of one-eyed dogs. Still, I’m sick over it: For her pain and trauma, for the loss of her pretty little face, and the way she turned her one remaining eye on me this morning and moaned, searching for something I didn’t have.

The Chinese family with the camcorder in front of me put a good face on it. But I knew that, like me, they were boneless, too, even if it’s not immediately apparent when you looked at them or at any other family in the stands. What you see instead is all of us passively bearing witness to the usual stuff: the amazingly brilliant class valedictorian turns to face the class of 2010 and the whole place roars at once for him; the principal says a few words; someone sings a big number with meaningful lyrics to befit a momentous occasion like this one. Like most of the canned stuff, this girl sings well enough, but the whole thing still comes off a little lame and overdone. One of the students lets fly an inflated beach ball that his classmates keep randomly alight.

Then before you know it, they’re lining up, and someone starts to call the names, and you watch as they cross the stage, one by one. And finally, my boy is the one crossing a stage, accepting a diploma in his left hand, and with his right shaking hands with his high school principal. He looks the guy directly in the eye and smiles, which momentarily strikes me as odd, because just last week he was a toddler and way too small to stand eye-to-eye with an adult. Or so it seems.

I’ve been dreading this day, in a way. Probably because this is one of those big moments – like the first day of kindergarten, which again was only a day or two ago — that signals a shift into a different point in time. It sounds dramatic to say that a high school graduation bookends a childhood, but I can’t help but feel that a little bit of that is true, and with it a part of me has been bunged, too. For parents, it seems there’s a subtle shift from player to onlooker, participant to armchair fan. Literally we were already there, of course, installed as spectators behind the arena hockey boards.

Then again, parents are good at watching, aren’t we? And in fact, our first responsibility is to watch. Newly pregnant Moms watch what we eat and how much we do. And later, after the birth, we watch for everything so as not to miss anything: the first smile, the first tooth, first steps. And we watch them sleep. Hours and hours of rocking and willing them to sleep and then more hours, too: If you could collect and mash together all those minutes spent hovering and covering and making sure they are still breathing.

They grow a little, and still we watch: for things that could harm -– kitchen chairs they could topple from, the things they can choke on: the impossibly stupid stones or grapes or nickels or anything they might swallow in a flash, before we can stop it. And later, we watch them jump into the deep end, and we catch the first glimpse of the kindergarten bus rolling toward your stop. And school plays and what’s-your-homework and a one more birthday candle on the cake, year after year.

We watch their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road, the site of them running across a field or dancing across a stage or whatever it is that they love to do. We watch where they put their stuff so we know where to tell them to find it later. We watch the back of their heads when they leave and they don’t turn around — which makes you wonder, for a minute, When did they stop looking back to you?

And maybe –- if one or both of you are lucky –- we get to observe their own pride in something they did or created or achieved, and maybe some recognition from some institution or individual that matters to them. Or we watch things that I can right now only imagine in some unfocused way, the way you try to imagine life on another planet, maybe: Their own transition into watching over some little being of their own.

I thought of this yesterday, as I watched him walk across the stage, and it occurred to me then: Has anything really changed? Isn’t this how it always is? In a way, aren’t we -– as parents — always waiting, already watching, always on the side of the field? From the moment of conception, aren’t we always sidelined?

Does that sound glum? Morose? I don’t mean it that way. Because yesterday, I actually took some comfort in the sudden perspective that being sidelined has always been a fundamental part of the job. It’s less about being marginalized or nonessential or other words that you might use to describe anything that’s a little off-center. Rather, it’s more the idea that, from birth, they have their own path to follow, which sometimes has surprisingly little to do with us.

But anyway, watching is a great thing to do, whether you are in an armchair or in the bleachers. Maybe you’re there to see a sports meet, or a dance recital, or a Tai Kwon Do exhibition, or — one amazing day — the walk across the graduation dais. Or, most thrilling of all, maybe one day you see what really counts: The glimpse of the broad smile that lights up his face as he strikes the bottom stair, and continues down the aisle, right past where you’re seated.

Sometimes it’s my son who starts the conversation, and sometimes I do. But either way, it’s clear that this is less a new topic than it is a thread of a conversation we’ve been having for many months, and probably years. It’s the same conversation every parent has first with a spouse and then later with the child himself, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I know I’ll miss him next year, and I know that will feel right. My friend Andy has a son who is several years older than mine, and when his went off to college Andy told me that little boys evolve into teenage boys so that you are more than happy to help them pack when the time comes.

In fact, I missed my son when he was away for six weeks this past summer. (I didn’t realize quite how much I missed him until suddenly there he was, grinning at me in the kitchen, and as I wrapped my arms around him I thought of that line in the poem by Walter Dean Myers, “Love that boy, like a rabbit loves to run.”)

When I told people then how he was loving the long hours he spent in the school’s clay studio and how he went back after dinner, and when I tell them now how he wants to study Ceramics in college, people often nod in a vague way about how wonderful that is before they ask something along the lines of, “So how’s he going to make a living at that?”

I can’t blame them, really. It’s crossed my mind a few times, as well. And about 25 years ago, it crossed the minds of my own parents, too, which is why my mother said to me, when I announced then that I wanted to be writer, that I might want to have a backup plan.

She wasn’t trying to be cruel; in fact, she just wanted me to have what she lacked: independence, and self-reliance, and the ability, when the guy you marry turns out to be a shit in a few key ways, to not to have to take it. It’s true that money can’t buy happiness. Yet ironically, I’ve noticed — and my mother certainly knew — that the lack of it can bring plenty of misery.

A few weeks ago my friend Paul Williams created something he called the Killer Phrase BINGO. We’re all familiar with the game BINGO: Fill out the game card, trying for five in a row to win and shout, “BINGO!” “One key reason new and potentially innovative ideas don’t get implemented at companies is because skeptics and scaredy cats kill ideas when they’re first proposed,” Paul wrote. “They use killer phrases like: ‘We’ve tried that before’ and ‘Yeah, but….’”

And so it goes in parenting, too. How many of the phrases do we use, as parents, because our own parents said them to us (here’s where I’ll admit to “Don’t make me turn this car around!”) or because we can’t bear to see our kids in pain (“Don’t make the same mistakes I did…”)? How much of our own parents do we bring to our own roles in the job, all over again?

Once, when my mother and I were having an uncharacteristically frank discussion about sex, she said to me, “Your generation didn’t invent sex, you know.” But didn’t we? Isn’t sex something we were left to puzzle through? Isn’t it up to every teenager to figure out, mostly on his or her own?

In that way, too, every generation thinks it invents parenting. Or, maybe, it’s every person who is reinvented as a parent: Sometimes, we are inspired by our own upbringing, and sometimes we exorcise it. And sometimes, as is the case with me, it’s a little of both.

In any case, Paul created this BINGO card for parents strictly for fun. But then again, you could use it for awareness, too—a reminder, of sorts, that we didn’t invent parenting, but we certainly can guide its evolution.