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I have a confession to make. I had secretly been looking forward to Maisie leaving home.
Before you judge me too harshly, I should explain that Maisie is my daughter’s dog.
She came into our family as hers when she was younger, and I had always assumed that one day, when circumstances allowed, my daughter would probably take her on full-time. Until then, Maisie became part of our household alongside Hank, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and somewhere along the way, I became one of the people responsible for feeding, walking, and generally negotiating with her.
I use the word negotiating deliberately.
Maisie is a wonderfully quirky, intelligent little dog. She is cheeky, stubborn and seems to regard most instructions as opening positions in a negotiation. Hank, meanwhile, absolutely adores her. His affection has always been considerably more enthusiastic than hers. He follows her around, wants to know where she is and seems genuinely delighted whenever she shows him the slightest attention. Maisie generally treats his devotion with the sort of gracious tolerance normally reserved for an overly enthusiastic admirer.
They have become quite a pair.
But two dogs also mean twice the feeding, twice the organising, two leads to untangle and two very different personalities requiring attention. These days, I spend a great deal of my time writing, usually with Hank next to me. He has become my unofficial writing companion, normally snoring beside me while I work and occasionally reminding me that there are more important things in life than finding exactly the right sentence.
So when my daughter moved to her own flat and eventually decided that the time had finally come for Maisie to live with her permanently, part of me thought this might actually make things easier.
One dog.
One lead.
One set of demands.
Hank and me carrying on with our familiar routine.
It all made perfect sense.
Then Maisie left. It’s been a couple of weeks now, and I have discovered something mildly irritating.
I miss her.
Not an idealised version of her, either. I miss the actual Maisie. The stubbornness. The cheekiness. The slightly unpredictable way she moves through the house as though she owns considerably more of it than the lease would suggest. I even miss the odd little relationship between her and Hank, where he adores her and she continues to behave as though she has not yet made up her mind about him.
Nothing tragic has happened. Maisie is very happy. She is living with the person whose dog she always really was, and I still see her. This is not a story about loss in any profound sense.
Yet the house feels different. It is easier, certainly, and it is also a little emptier. That has made me think about something I had never really considered before.
We spend an enormous amount of our lives trying to make things easier.
