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Have you ever come to the end of a day and looked forward to bedtime, not for your kids, but for yourself? A day when you’ve been in what seems like constant motion and done thing after thing after thing and your mind is fixed on how awesome it’s going to feel when you finally snuggle down under your covers and drift off to sleep? Maybe you’ve already guessed where this post is heading, but if not, here we are: you cannot wait for the comfort and the drowsiness to lead you into sleep, but then, well, it doesn’t happen. There you are, in the dark, snuggled and cozied, and…wide awake.
It happens. Maybe the mind turns up the volume on the next day’s tasks or perhaps all the things left undone begin ticking through your brain. Whatever the reason, despite all that anticipation, you just cannot fall asleep. That was me last night. And, despite knowing better, I opted to pick up my phone nonetheless because I wanted to see what movies might be playing in a couple of weeks that maybe I could plan to go see on a solo outing. While I found a wonderful possibility—The Friend, starring Naomi Watts & Bill Murray—it turns out the movie is no longer in theaters (even if the advertisement & trailer are still on the theater’s app). If, like me, you’re not familiar with this little gem of a film, it’s a story about friendship, loss, and grief and centers around Watts’ character being bequeathed Murray’s Great Dane dog and how the two of them help each other through their grieving of Murray’s character.
While I cannot yet find a place to watch this movie, it brought to mind the gift animals are in our lives, and that, in turn, got me thinking about how animals tend to tease out my girls’ personalities in ways nothing else seems to. I have seen this again and again, not only with our cat, Zuzu, but with dogs we meet when we’re out and about, in reactions to videos involving birds, cats, and dogs, and in documentaries about all manner of wild or domesticated animals. I recently wrote about the Big Bear Bald Eagle Live Nest live stream we check pretty much every day that tracks Jackie & Shadow and their two eaglets. My girls also love stories that either include an animal as a main character or part of an ensemble of characters, but even more they are deeply drawn into stories narrated by an animal (like The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane & Tale of Despereaux).
Animals, and their inherent cuteness, inspire absolute delight as well as a deep empathy in my girls, especially should they hear a story regarding any animal’s poor well-being. In fact, my oldest once said that even watching a fictionalized story wherein an animal’s life or well-being is threatened in any way was not something she could watch; she admitted that watching the death of an animal character in a movie was harder than watching a movie involving a human death or mistreatment.
Whatever the circumstance that brings an animal into their world—whether a story or the glimpse of a squirrel in the wild or the viewing of an Instagram reel or the “derpiness” of our cat—I love the emotions that bubble up in our teenagers. I love that they have a tender heart for others, including critters both real and fictional. To me, such a response reveals the true beauty in someone’s heart, including these two incredible young women. Their hearts are already beautiful to me, but their care and concern for our web-footed, four-footed, two-winged friends reminds me just how lovely these two teenagers truly are.