Leslie Stephens on Choosing New Paths

Read "How My Dog Saved Me During My Divorce," Leslie's new essay about how Toast shepherded her through the unweaving of her relationship

Exciting news! I just made my monthly donation to The DeTommaso Dogs thanks to my paid subscribers! This dog rescue is a one-woman operation (with a network of loving foster families), and Ana saves hundreds of starving, sick dogs living on the street every year and gets them into their forever homes. When you subscribe to Beyond, a portion of your monthly subscription goes toward helping these dogs. If you have the means, please consider subscribing.

When I first learned about Substack,

Leslie Stephens

newsletter

morning person

was one of the first ones I subscribed to. It’s smart, insightful, engaging, and bursting with thoughtful recommendations on everything from books to food to inspiring acceptance speeches (up next: helpful tips for dogs). Leslie also shares beautiful, tender essays on her separation from her husband and now life on her own. Well, not completely on her own: She has her beloved and very charming pit-mix Toast pretty much glued to her side! And luckily for us Beyonders (passionate lovers of dogs!), Leslie wrote an essay about the interweaving and then unweaving of her relationship with her now ex-husband and how Toast guided her along this path.

Leslie and Toast live in Portland, Oregon where they have daily adventures. Leslie’s novel, You’re Safe Here, will be released in June 2024 (expect an interview!). She’s also in the process of completing her Master’s in Mental Health Counseling at Lewis and Clark College. On top of all that, she’s kind, compassionate, and, well, loves dogs!

How My Dog Saved Me During My Divorce

In the photos of him online, Toast was all legs. Stick-thin and weak from an early battle with a parvovirus infection, his paws jutted toward the lens, making his head and body look cartoonishly small. At sixteen weeks, he bore the mischievous glint of a toddler that still, three years later, hasn’t gone away. It was love at first sight and after FaceTiming with his foster family and outfitting our apartment with half of a Petco, my husband and I arranged for his transport.

Like many of the adopted dogs in Portland, Oregon, Toast came to us from Texas, where litter surrenders are far more common. I was expecting a van of six or so dogs when my husband and I pulled into the long line heading toward a semi-truck outfitted with at least a hundred crates of “pandemic pups.” As we pulled up, volunteers placed ours in the trunk per distancing protocol, with the advice, “Dawn dish soap.” I didn’t fully understand what they meant until the latch closed and a putrid scent filled the car. I climbed over the seats into the back where I cradled our stinky mutt who nestled into himself into my arms, grateful to be held after his long journey.

The first few weeks of training Toast felt like having a newborn, an observation I only had to admit to one friend with a baby before learning my lesson. My husband and I took turns waking to Toast’s whimpers and letting him out of his crate to pee in the designated spot of grass outside of our apartment building. Having a dog was a step along a path of what I thought an adult life should entail: marriage, then dog, mortgage, and children. Toast marked halfway. Every morning, our family of three would walk to the community track a block from our building and I would run laps while Toast ambled alongside my husband, trotting forward a few feet on his unstable puppy legs each time I passed, forgetting that I would come back around.

Next on the list was buying a house. When we moved into ours that winter, Toast began to join me on my daily runs in our new neighborhood. His legs were strong enough now to keep up, yet he was insistent that we stop every few blocks to examine a tree or investigate a pile of wet leaves. Together, we learned to speak a shared language in which we advocated for our needs, me for my mile time and him for his curiosity, and made compromises for the other. I learned that certain stumps could not go un-sniffed and he always obliged to sprinting the final few blocks home.

During the days, he would regain his energy by lazily dozing on the back of our living room couch, keeping an eye half-open to protect us from the mail carrier he hated so deeply that he would growl softly under his breath, muttering like a grumpy old man, any time we passed someone in navy shorts. He developed new preferences too—eating sand at the beach, stretching his entire body out dangerously close to the fireplace—and passions, which boiled down to fetch. Whenever possible, we brought Toast to a large dog park a few miles away to toss the ball for him. One day, as Toast befriended a Jack Russell terrier, we made small talk with the owner who confided, “I share my dog with my ex—we trade him back and forth every few weeks.” I wonder what that would be like, I thought, surprised by my own intrigue.

The week after Toast’s first birthday, I left my fulltime job as an editor to begin a Master’s in Addictions Counseling. My class schedule, more forgiving than a nine-to-five, opened a hole in my schedule that Toast was happy to fill. The two of us began to go for hikes in the middle of the day, in and around Portland, exploring trails in tandem. He would sniff dropped pine needles, looking up at me to ask—as far as I could tell—if I was enjoying the path as much as he. I answered him by extending our walks, little by little. On weekends, Toast and I would share our favorite trails with my husband, happily chatting before heading home for brunch.

When my husband and I turned thirty later that year, we began to speak more earnestly about having a child and how we would introduce a baby to Toast. On my hikes with Toast however, I began to wonder for the first time, if I was happy with another path I was walking—the one I had chosen for my life. It was paved and lovely, but I had a gnawing sense that it was too smooth. I craved something wilder; I was no longer sure I wanted a child. I explained this to my husband—kind and patient, my partner of a decade—with the best words I had for it, “I’m in emotional turmoil.” I repeated the phrase until it lost its meaning, but I didn’t have another way of describing the chaos that had bubbled from some stowed-away box to my consciousness. Without the language to describe it, I felt completely alone.  

I began to take refuge in my walks with Toast, extending them to several hours a day. Because I met my husband when we were nineteen, I had little experience being alone, but began to drive to trailheads that were hours away, emboldened by Toast’s company. Together, we hiked mountains and my heart raced along with my thoughts. Did I really want children? Was I blindly following a path someone else had chosen for me? I loved my husband, but did I want to spend my life with him? What else could my life look like? They only slowed when Toast set his long legs stick-straight, straining against his leash to insist on a sniff break, the same way he had on our runs. As he examined the trail, I inhaled the vanilla scent of Jeffrey pines or briny salt coming off the ocean, which opened enough space for one thought to emerge, “I need to find my own path.”

In July of 2022, I moved out of the house I shared with my husband into a furnished month-long rental, perfect except for the fact that it didn’t allow pets. I selected the basement apartment for its safety and proximity to a favorite park, which I spent everyday walking, pausing the way Toast had taught me, to allow me enough time to consider the path.

Every week, my husband would meet me so we could walk Toast together. I owed him an explanation and endeavored to translate my trail-inspired hunches into something more concrete. Maybe we met too young, maybe we got married too early, maybe I’m going crazy. Toast strolled happily between us, thrilled to be reunited, loving us both unconditionally, never demanding that I explain myself.

At the end of the month, I moved out of the home I shared with my husband into a studio apartment in a new building I selected largely for its immediate availability and dog-friendliness. My husband kept Toast behind the door of his home office while I worked with a mover to navigate my desk and guest bed frame into a van. I took as little furniture as possible, leaving the living room and Toast’s perch on the couch intact. Maybe it’s no wonder that Toast felt uncomfortable in the new apartment, so sparsely outfitted I felt the impulse to play into the stereotype of a divorced parent, “I filled the fridge with all the sugary drinks Dad won’t let you have! Let’s order pizza—no let’s order whatever you want! Ha ha! Isn’t this fun?” The abundance of toys and familiar crate did little to help him feel at home in this strange place where only one parent lived. Anytime I crated him to leave my apartment, he protested at full volume—something he hadn’t done since we first adopted him. I could hear his impassioned wails from down the hall when I left for longer than a few seconds. The fear of losing my apartment from noise complaints, and the crushing sense that I was to blame, meant that Toast rarely left my side anytime I had him during the first few months, both of us growing increasingly dependent on the other’s companionship as he joined me in coffee shops, for meetings on the campus of my graduate school, and, of course, hikes. At night, I canceled plans to sit cross-legged on my new couch so he could curl into my lap, the same way he had in the trunk on that first drive home. 

As my husband and I began the process of legally divorcing, we fumbled to navigate the obstacles presented by sharing a dog. At first, we passed Toast back and forth twice a week to accommodate my school schedule, working around eight-hour blocks of classes and Toast’s separation anxiety. Taking care of Toast on my own, I quickly learned, came with its own difficulties. There was no one else to take him out in the middle of the night when he got sick or run with him to the park with when I felt crushed by a deadline. Still, our time apart was far worse. Although I had gotten used to solitude on trails, the silence that filled my apartment in the absence of Toast’s soft snores and demands to be paid attention to was crushing. On nights he returned, he would curl against me on the couch as I read so I could stroke the soft part fur behind his ears.

 Each time we handed off Toast, my husband and I would walk, making polite conversation that gently explored the other’s life without probing too deep, in an attempt that felt surreal. Without acknowledging it, our conversations began to revolve around Toast. We sent photos of him, dozing in a sunspot or leaping for his beloved tennis ball, in lieu of greetings in texts about logistics. My husband and my separation shed a light on myriad problems we had never talked about in our relationship and eventually, he acknowledged that separating was the right decision though it did little to abate the pain for either of us. It was comforting, during those first few months, to pretend on those walks that we had rewound the clock to the time when we had been a family.

Eventually, the walks became more difficult, then nearly impossible. My ex and I both began dating other people, and it was painful to recognize that we no longer knew the other’s life by heart. I had noticed that Toast perked up anytime we passed by a Doodle, which prompted my ex to admit was the breed of dog of his new partner. We resembled strangers more than we did spouses. Toast bounded between us, this time looking curiously over his shoulder when he would notice one or both of us crying. Eventually, I hired a trainer and a dogwalker to walk Toast on days I had back-to-back classes, and we developed a routine of contactless hand-offs through a daycare, so that my ex and I wouldn’t have to pass him off quite as often. Seeing each other became too painful, an opening of a barely soldered wound.

The week before our first meeting with the lawyer who would facilitate our divorce, my ex and I walked in a neighborhood equidistant between my apartment and his house, until we found a park bench. Toast, who had been too energetic to sit still for a moment during the first two years of his life, sat calmly on the ground between us. The air between us felt tense, yet we couldn’t help from beaming at our dog who had shepherded us both through dark nights and was growing himself. After an hour, we stood up from the bench, and my ex handed me the leash. A few weeks later, he would do the same thing with an acknowledgement I had been too nervous to hope for, “I’ve been thinking, I think you should keep Toast. He was always really your dog.” He walked me to where I had parked and stood waiting as our little dog bounded into the backseat of the same car we had brought him home in. We embraced, as we always do, before I drove away. Toast turned to perch his paws against the backseat, catching another glance before returning to his seat, excited to see what path we were heading on next.

Tell me…

Has an animal ever helped shepherd you into a new phase of life? What lessons did you learn and what comforted you the most?