Rescued dogs

My husband and I rescue dogs. We've had five dogs in the 23 years we've been living together. Three came directly from the street, two from shelters. We have three dogs right now, an older female (the Queen of the House), a middle aged male, and a young male we adopted two months ago. Ceili, Tyler and Jasper.

Jasper has more energy than all the rest of us put together. He weighed 33 pounds when he followed a friend of a friend home from our local park. We feed him as much as we feed Tyler, who weighs thirty pounds more than he does. After a month, he had lost a pound. He only has one setting: supercharged. Every midlife woman wants Jasper's metabolism.

Jasper wasn't housebroken when we adopted him. He lacked the most basic skills of a housedog. As far as we can tell, he had lived in the park for at least a couple of months, and probably had lived in a yard before that. But he's sweet, and smart, and willing. We're good with dogs, and we worked hard to train Jasper. He went for a solid month without an accident in the house, then all hell broke loose. Five days in a row with pee or poop somewhere it shouldn't be. Usually somewhere we discovered by stepping in it. We're coping, and things have been back on track for a couple of days.

What, you ask, does this have to do with reinvention? Well, we're reinventing Jasper as a house dog, something he has to learn how to be. It demonstrates, rather graphically, that reinvention is not linear. You move forward, you move back.

Reinvention is all about tradeoffs. The first month we had Jasper, he would bolt whenever the door was open. He's small and thin, and very, very fast. It was tough to keep him in the house, in the car, on the leash. He may weigh only 33 pounds but he can pull a leash out of our hands. I don't think he wanted to run away, exactly. He just wanted to run. He wasn't used to being inside.

Unless you absolutely hated your previous life, giving it up requires some serious thought. And like Jasper, you will find yourself looking at the life you left behind.