Woofy Displays of Affection
One of the give-away symptoms of autism is an aversion to being touched. Aversion isn’t really the word. Oh, it’s the textbook word, but it’s doesn’t describe the all-points bulletin that charges through the nervous system on contact. I, and countless others on the autistic spectrum, have been known to reflexively hit when touched. It’s simply self-defense. At this point it probably is conditioned as much as innate, of course—every time a human touches me, I’m reacting as much to all the previous unwelcome contacts as to the current one—but it really is innate and not to be conditioned away. One of the first differences parents of babies on the autistic spectrum notice is that the babies dislike being touched. We maintain that, with various degrees of surliness, forever afterward. When discussing with someone a hypothetical instruction manual on interacting with Aspies, I proposed that the title should be Don’t Touch Me! A Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome for Neurotypicals.
It’s different with nonhumans, though; my understanding that it usually is for the autistic. Maybe it’s because nonhumans are a little more reticent when it comes to physical contact: you’ve got to get down to their level and hold out a hand to be sniffed before pats are even considered. Humans want you to shake hands before you’ve even heard their name, and meeting a human is already such a full-on assault that I almost never take in their name when I do hear it. Maybe it’s the hands themselves, though: they grasp and hold on, unlike the nonhumans I’ve had contact with. At any rate, I like physical contact with nonhumans, and I don’t mean just the furry ones. Not that I have much contact with the scaled and the feathered, but I am just as pleased to as with furry nonhumans that I’m not allergic to. (Unfortunately, I am allergic to most of them; I think dogs are an exception because I got shots for them when I was young.)
Sunny has his own definite preferences regarding physical contact, too. Mommy is to keep her monkey paws off the feet. If Mommy gets pushy about the feet—for instance, for the purpose of trimming footy hair—Sunny goes into hyper lick mode. He’s had some very bright ideas, that woofus, and he has figured out that licking hands interferes sufficiently with whatever he doesn’t want done and has no adverse consequences, unlike snapping. When it does come time to trim the feet, I average about one foot before the licking has increased to the point where I might trim his tongue instead and I have to wait more than a day between attempts before we get down to the point that the licking isn’t instant. Sunny’s feet look very odd for the few days that I’m attending to the fur, but he’s a dog. Unlike rabbits, he doesn’t care how he looks.
The other thing he doesn’t like is monkey kisses. I do understand that lip-mashing is an oddity in the entire animal kingdom, but for Sunny, it’s too odd to be borne. I know it’s not my breath; I brush and floss to my hygienist’s approval and I don’t smoke or drink coffee or tea, so it can’t be bad enough for a dog to be offended. If I get my face close to his, he turns his head the other way. I have tried to substitute merely putting my face next to his with no kisses, but he works so hard at avoiding that that he has developed the nickname Sir Butt-in-Face. I don’t know if going to the length of doggie kisses would help, but there is just no way I’m going to try licking Sunny.
I doubt that’s what he is trying to get me to do, anyway. Not that he does not plainly believe in ucky-wet doggie kisses: he dispenses them freely. Dogs, cats, humans . . . everyone but me. A neighbor’s toy poodle persisted in giving my nose a thorough cleaning every time we met, and Sunny returned the favor with members of Chocco’s family, but at home, Sunny only licks my hands, mostly when he wants me to not do something. There is only one time I can count on a doggie kiss, and under the circumstances, I can’t enjoy it.
Despite many attempts by my mother to the contrary, I have never been a morning person. Not that I’m a night owl, but mornings are decidely an unwelcome event in my universe. They’re bright (always, compared to the darkness that preceded them). They’re cold. They’re damp. They’re the start of another round of the “Survive Humanity” game (if only they’d just let me lose once and for all and leave me alone thereafter!). All in all, I would be just as glad if some way around mornings could be found. Of course anyone out there with a dog knows the problem here: dogs are morning people. There may be a contrary canine out there somewhere, but I’ve never heard of a dog who wasn’t just busting with as much joy as their age would allow at the arrival of a new day. Of course there are many reasons for this, among them that dogs tend to see life as one big enjoyable team sport, but for most dogs there is another, very basic motivator. Their monkeys let them Out in the morning, and Out is where their bathroom is.
Certainly this is part of Sunny’s joy in mornings. I have to give the little guy that he never has resorted to waking me up (although he has done that to the people who have looked after him one of the few times I’ve been away). He sits and watches me, waiting for me to open my eyes. I have woken many mornings to a face furrowed with woofy concentration that instantly dissolves into glee. Mommy is awake and therefore morning is here! Now he just has to get her out of bed.
The Rise and Shine Ritual begins with the Morning Boogie. It has gotten more abbreviated as he has moved into middle age, but it is not dispensed with and some mornings it’s just as fervorous as in his youth. This dance, closely related to the Snow Spaniel Tango, starts with wiggling and ends with wagging in the upside-down position (a.k.a. snow angels, although of course there isn’t any snow inside). In the middle there is a great deal of face-tobogganing; that is, putting the side of one’s face on the ground, picking up speed with one’s hindquarters, and then sliding along the ground with one’s face as the leading edge (of course only to be done on soft surfaces, like snow or a comforter). Having worked off the excess of one’s woofy joy, it is time to get down to the serious business of monkey-rousting. Time-honored techniques for this include head-butting along the monkey’s body, pawing at same, face-tobogganing along the monkey’s body so that said body gets whalloped (sometimes in the face) by one’s hindquarters at the climax of the move, whimpering at a loud level, hyena yips, and, of course, ucky-wet doggie kisses.
Ucky-wet doggie kisses are Sunny’s last-ditch effort to roust his lazy monkey. It’s the only time he’s willing to go that length, and there’s a noticeable pause before each one, as if he’s calculating whether it’s really necessary. I try not to hold out for them. Of course, as I’ve said, I love the doggie kisses, but clearly Sunny does not. I dropped “Paw” from his list of commands for treats just because I noticed the same sort of hesitation before he did it and did it very briefly. If unwanted contact is unacceptably close to blackmail when the prize is a doggie treat, a different sort of unwanted contact for a bladder emptied in a Mommy-acceptable fashion, is . . . sludgemail, perhaps. It’s especially so coming from me, after all my insistence that no one touch me. Not that I am foolish enough to think Sunny feels the same way toward me about the doggie kisses—he’s a woofus, not an Aspie—but clearly he is doing something he doesn’t want to do to get something he really needs. He’s got to not like that, regardless in what manner and to what degree he does. Granted, sometimes we get to the point of doggie kisses just because I really don’t want to get up or he really wants me to. The irony of course is that the doggie kisses work even better because I know Sunny doesn’t want to do them: a zap in the conscience is often enough to get even the most sluglike of monkeys going in the morning!
The good news is that the putting-face-near-but-not-kissing seems to be gaining in acceptance. He still tends to orient himself toward me with his butt forward, but when he does get his head close we can have a little snuggle that’s nice for both of us. I’ll keep up the good oral hygiene, though, just in case Sunny thinks perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to start kissing Mommy.