Limitless Adventures in Pawrenting

Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.

The most ambitious DIY project I ever took on began with confidence.

And a hose.

When I brought Romo home from the shelter, I had the naive optimism of someone who thinks love is enough preparation. He was my Belgian Malinois — all sharp lines and watchful eyes — and the very first thing on my mental checklist was simple: give him a bath.

How hard could that be?

I led him into the bathroom like a proud new mother introducing her child to civilization. The tub gleamed. The towels were stacked. I turned on the water, adjusting the temperature with the seriousness of someone calibrating a laboratory experiment. He stood there, tolerating me, unreadable.

To make the experience soothing — because I believed in spa-level transitions — I let the water run so he could “soak” and have his moment. I stepped away to gather supplies: shampoo, a mug, perhaps misplaced confidence.

When I returned, what I witnessed was less spa day and more evolutionary breakthrough.

Romo had crawled halfway up the bathroom wall.

Not metaphorically.

Physically.

He was pressed against the tiles, limbs splayed, body flattened, clinging like a lizard defying gravity. His eyes were wide with betrayal. This was not bonding. This was survival.

In that moment, I realized two things:

I had dramatically underestimated him. I had dramatically overestimated myself.

That bath was my first true DIY project — not because it involved plumbing or renovation, but because it was the beginning of constructing an entirely new version of myself.

You don’t “own” a Belgian Malinois. You enroll in a leadership program you did not read the syllabus for.

Bathing him required strategy. Physical leverage. Negotiation. Trust-building. Towels became barricades. My voice shifted into tones I didn’t know I possessed — calm, firm, pleading. The water that was meant to soothe had become the enemy. The bathroom, a battlefield.

Eventually, gravity won. And so did I — barely.

But that evening, as I sat on the floor with a damp, indignant dog glaring at me, I understood something profound: this was not about hygiene. It was about capacity.

Romo was my most ambitious DIY project because I was building discipline in real time. There were no instructions. No prior experience. Just instinct and stubborn devotion. Every walk, every training session, every unexpected wall-climbing episode was a lesson in adaptability.

He forced me to become structured. Decisive. Stronger than my embarrassment.

And perhaps the most ambitious part was this: I had chosen him.

I chose the responsibility. The chaos. The growth curve.

That first bath taught me that ambition is not always glamorous. Sometimes it is standing in a soaked bathroom, shampoo in your hair, realizing that love is not soft — it is a construction site.

Romo was not just a dog I adopted.

He was a self I built.

One slippery, stubborn, lizard-on-a-wall moment at a time.

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

There are seasons in life that do not end.

They dissolve.

And the hardest ones to release are not the longest — but the most concentrated.

I came back from my travels in December with a quiet vow stitched into my chest: I would give Romo all my time. No distractions. No divided loyalties. Just us. I did not know I was stepping into a goodbye.

Romo — my Belgian Malinois, my storm of muscle and loyalty — had always been intensity embodied. But those last three months, something shifted. The chaos softened. The urgency thinned. It was as if both of us sensed a curtain lowering somewhere in the distance, though neither of us named it.

His illness crept in without drama. There was no cinematic warning. Just small changes. A tiredness. A pause in his stride. The kind of subtle recalibration you can almost ignore — until you cannot.

Those three months became sacred.

Time rearranged itself. My days revolved around his breathing, his appetite, the rhythm of his rest. I watched him the way one watches the horizon before a storm — alert, reverent, afraid. And in that vigilance, something almost spiritual unfolded between us.

We had always shared loyalty. But now we shared awareness.

He began looking at me differently. Not as his handler. Not as the source of commands or structure. But as if memorizing me. There were moments when his eyes held mine with a stillness that felt ancient. As if he was saying: Stay present. This is it.

And I did.

I sat on floors more. I delayed outings. I rearranged priorities without resentment. The world narrowed beautifully. It was just breath and fur and the quiet weight of his head resting against my thigh.

Grief, I learned, begins before death.

It begins in the noticing.

In the way you start measuring moments.

In the way every ordinary act — refilling a water bowl, brushing his coat, stepping outside into cold air — feels edged with fragility.

When February came, it did not ask permission.

Saying goodbye to Romo was not dramatic. It was intimate. It was the quiet shattering of a daily rhythm that had structured my adulthood. For years, he had been the axis around which my discipline, my finances, my routines revolved. He had trained me into responsibility. Into endurance. Into devotion that did not negotiate.

And then suddenly — silence.

The leash hung unused.

The house echoed.

My body kept waking at the hour he used to nudge me.

The difficult part was not just losing him. It was losing the version of myself that existed in relation to him. The vigilant one. The caretaker. The woman whose day was dictated by paws on hardwood floors.

That phase was difficult to say goodbye to because it was pure.

There was no ego in it. No performance. Just presence.

Those three months taught me something about love that no human relationship ever had: that love can be both anticipatory and accepting. I knew we were running out of time. And yet I was also strangely calm. As if the bond between us had moved beyond fear.

We had built something beyond ownership.

We built surrender.

When I said goodbye, I was not just letting go of Romo. I was releasing a season of concentrated tenderness — a compressed lifetime in ninety days. I was saying farewell to the version of myself who had the privilege of loving him in that heightened, almost sacred awareness.

Some phases are difficult to say goodbye to because they were happy.

Some because they were painful.

But the hardest ones are the ones that were transformative.

Romo’s final months did not just break me.

They refined me.

And I think the ache remains not because I lost him — but because that rare, luminous intensity of being fully present with another soul is something I have never experienced in quite the same way again.

It was brief.

It was sacred.

And it changed the architecture of my heart.