Sarah Fenske’s in dogged pursuit of maternal instinct

I am living a completely selfish life, which, now that I realize it, scares me a little. At least in my 20s I had a pair of fish!

So I decided to get a dog.

I'm not really a dog person: never been around them, never really wanted to be around them. But cats can't come with you to the park, they don't like parties, and they certainly don't want to fly to San Francisco for an impromptu weekend getaway. I'm not sure my dog will want to do all this, either, but I'm hopeful.

I'm also petrified.

At first, when the idea was abstract, it was fun. I spent hours making lists of dog names. Henry? Trotsky? Buckley!

But when the breeder was selected, and the puppy picked, I started to worry. There's good reason I don't have pets or plants or babies in my life. I like staying out late and drinking too much. I don't have a primary-care physician and I don't take my vitamins. I don't want to take care of myself, much less anyone else.

So what, I thought, if I come home too late one night, and the dog's peed all over my apartment?

What if he gets sick? What if I accidentally starve him to death?

What if, asks a small voice inside my head, he doesn't like me?

And now I'm thinking frantically about how I need a puppy gate and a puppy crate and puppy food and I need to find a vet and — how do people do this? And how do they afford it?

Maybe it's only because ads for Mother's Day are everywhere this week, but I thought of my mom.

She was 26 when she got pregnant with my older sister. Not all that young, of course, but younger than I am today. And here I'm freaking out about a dog.

How could my mom possibly have known what she was doing?

How does any mother?

There are five of us Fenske kids, and I used to think how alien we must have seemed to my mother.

My mother comes from a family of Indiana farmers, one that's tilled the same fertile soil since 1830 without ever questioning their calling. I don't want to say they're simple people, but calling them complicated would be not only inaccurate, but an insult to their good humor, their heartiness, their all-around niceness. My mother was the only girl among three brothers and was the apple of her daddy's eye. An Indiana princess.

No one has ever accused me or my siblings of being royalty. As kids, we were all elbows and Coke-bottle glasses; I'm not really sure my mother knew what to do with fourth-graders who read Thomas Hardy and played "French Revolution" in the backyard. We were young royals on the lam from marauding peasants. (I know, I know.) My sisters and I always felt that we were letting Mom down because we weren't pretty and we weren't popular. But what could we do about it? We were clueless.

My mom says that none of this ever occurred to her. She doesn't overthink things the way I do, I guess.

I called her last week to talk about my dog fears. Of course, I didn't frame it that way; I could hardly admit to my mother that I was petrified about something so silly. So we talked about kids — specifically, her decision to give up any semblance of a glamorous life and have the five of us.

She said that, at the time, she never really stopped to think about the choices she was making. That's how it was then. You got married, you bought a house, and then you had kids. You didn't agonize over children the way my girlfriends do because, in part, your choices were fewer. You could not, for the most part, decide to have a baby if you weren't in a committed relationship. Nor could you wait until you were 45 and try something tricky with hormones. Or just pick Daddy out at a sperm bank.

So after my mom and dad got married, they bought a house. They decided to have a baby soon after that mostly because, my mom says, she didn't like her job.

"I was pretty restless," she says.