In our house -- a farm house that's home to an only child -- pets give shape to our day from the second our now 7-year-old daughter's feet hit the floor.

Before heading to the bathroom herself, she pads to the door to let out the 13-year-old Vizsla who puts up with "sharing" her tangle of bed covers each night.

Hearing the door crack open, our herd of cats shoots the gap, and I hear my daughter exclaim over their dew-wet feet, or their light pawing of each other as they dive into the cat-food bowl she fills, out of the dogs' reach on a bench inside the door. 

Many of our three dogs and five cats pre-date our daughter's birth and have had to adjust to her constant handling -- the chasing and babying, and her patter, often very close to their faces. Those that came into our lives while she could name them and watch them grow from babyhood are nonsensically pliant and forgiving. These are cats that can be strung up by one paw, when she drops something, say, and reaches down to fumble for it, the cat tipping like a nearly-spilt cup of juice under her other arm. 

For an only child, our farm kid especially, pets are siblings. They're the animated other in her life when mom and dad sit motionless in communion with computer screens. They will chase ping-pong balls around the living room and pounce on fingers that wiggle underneath bedspreads. They will curl up and purr or stretch out and snore within an arm's reach, even with the steady hum of her singing or chastising of Baby, her fallible imaginary playmate. They run ahead of us, climbing trees or splashing into the creek, whenever we leave the house on foot or four-wheeler or bicycle or sled. They are the first thing she hugs when she gets scared of her parents' arguing and the last thing she asks for at night. 

Our pets also introduce our daughter to hard things she doesn't always grasp in the realm of human significance -- like injury and death. A veterinarian once showed me how our four-footed companions can suppress physical pain long past the point at which a human would be howling in misery. At the time she had one of our older dogs sedated for a hysterectomy, and she was preparing to pull one of our dog's teeth while she was unconscious -- it had broken nearly in half, exposing the roots, probably in the chewing of the many bones to be found on a farm.

"Animals usually won't even flinch until they're completely under and you lay your tools right on the nerve that's exposed," the vet said. I had no idea my dog's teeth were so damaged.

This amazing tolerance gives my daughter a close look at injured flesh and bone: a tumor swelling like a blister on the tip of a cat's nose; a pocket of fluid that wells up on a dog's head; stitches that mark the removal of a cancerous teat; a warty protrusion growing through the hide of a cow.

My daughter takes these details to heart, asking at bedtime not for fairy tales but for real-life accounts of how people or animals she knows personally have been hurt, have bled, have healed. I take this as a good sign she's aware of what bodies can endure, possibly cultivating an understanding of that crossing over -- the point at which life cannot be sustained.

Last year, my daughter helped me bury the first of our aging pets -- a raccoon-sized, pitch-black lazybones of a cat named Frank, who got louder and more insistent as his eyesight and hearing failed. Most days, he didn't leave the steps leading up to the house, assured that both the people and the food would show up in close proximity at some point. He was hit and killed when he sprinted in front of a co-worker's truck on our gravel driveway; he had followed me and Eliza when we set out on foot. 

Together, Eliza and I dug a Frank-sized hole in the backyard, near an oak sapling I had been sheltering from the deer that feast on plantings close to the house in winter. When we walked around the quonset shed to pick up Frank's body, I was shocked by how heavy it was and how it stretched to couple feet as I lifted him by the legs, then got my other hand under his head, where it wasn't matted with blood. We had some trouble refolding him to fit even our generous resting place, but eventually, I sat talking to him, stroking his glossy but slightly ill-groomed old-man-cat fur and recounting the 11 years he'd lived with us. 

"What are you doing, Mama?" Eliza asked. 
"Well, I'm just trying to remember how good Frank's life was and that we loved him," I said. 
Then she, too, petted his head, examining the pink of his distended tongue with fascination.

As we pushed in the dirt and mounded it up so the dogs wouldn't dig into the grave, Eliza said something that made me think she didn't quite get the finality of it, that death was irreversible.

But that night by lamplight, she got the story right. Frank joined the Pantheon of hurts and heartbreaks she keeps enshrined in her last waking thoughts.

"He can't come back alive, can he Mama," she decided. "But we put dirt on him so the worms will come and find him, right?" 

I had forgotten I'd said anything about decomposition, but the idea took root. 
She'll often ask what Frank looks like 'now.'
​And we talk about how clean bones can shine.

We had rented skates. We had done the whole warming-hut-popcorn-and-Gatorade routine. 

We had even been to this public rink -- the city basketball courts, flooded in winter -- a handful of times in the span of a week, and my 6-year-old daughter had grown from a hanger-on, slipping and sliding in all directions, to a fairly confident skater, making turns and accelerating from one end of the rink to the other. 

She stopped to watch the pick-up hockey players crashing around on the other half of the court from time to time, then tried out some of their moves, unaware that I was watching her with pride, as I made my own laps around the rink. She could see that falling was part of the game and became more theatrical about sliding to a stop when she lost her balance.

Then she fell mid-turn, and landed on her left hip, her right leg slamming atop her left as she hit the ice. We both knew something had changed as soon as she swished her snowpants a little and grimaced. By the time I got her to her feet, the tears had started, but they didn't convince me of anything other than the shock of falling hard. I hauled her under one arm up the ramp to the warming shed and onto the bench where we'd left our boots. Frustrated by her wailing and inability to help me wrestle off her skates, I remember turning to the concerned high-schooler behind the concession stand and downplaying the damage -- "Just a little twist," I think I said. 

Reader: Here's where I admit I come from pretty bootstrappy stock. I don't coddle often, and I have zero patience for my daughter's attempts to act younger than her age, needling for help she doesn't need -- tying shoes, wiping her butt, adjusting the temperature in the shower. There are a lot of tears in our daily life over trifling things like what to wear, hair that resists brushing, and having to eat breakfast. Whatever the cause, I lack some degrees of compassion.

So, we slept on the situation and went to the clinic in the morning, where the specter of there being something really wrong with her leg silenced her long enough for the physician to shrug and say, "Well, try to get her to walk on it," handing me some kid-sized crutches. 

Trying to get back through the clinic waiting area to the car, I switched on the tough love. By this time, the crying had given way to shrieks of terror as she realized I wasn't going to carry her and was instead walking ahead to push the door open for her. "Mama! Mama, don't leave me!" she sobbed. 

My response? I started laughing. I couldn't help it. My body's deepest impulse was not to embrace her, to give a little when a 6-year-old was clearly in pain. Me? I laughed. I heard myself and caught the complexity of the situation on the face of the nurse receptionist, who was frowning. By the time we got to the car, I was mad at my daughter, scolding her for lack of 'try.'

Five days, three assessments and three X-rays later, a pediatric orthopede applied a thigh-high cast to heal her broken tibia (she'd had a splint in the days prior, while swelling receded). Adults typically break both the tibia and fibula, but Eliza had been lucky in a kid-flexible kind of way. It didn't need pins or surgery for alignment. It needed time -- 10 weeks to be exact.

As we stumbled through the first agonizing days of helping her dress, helping her turn over in bed in the night, helping her submerge backwards into a bath, her casted leg in a garbage bag, resting on the side of the tub, and helping her in and out of buildings and her kid-sized wheelchair to avoid putting weight on the leg, I felt sorry for both of us. Here was a kid with a life-altering wound. And here was her parent, with barely enough empathy to be bothered.

What the f&!? 

Am I really so selfish? I am sometimes shocked how mixed my emotions are in wanting to be over and done with the sticky entrapments of parenting, like a constant pulling of my arms and legs and brain out of the thick taffy of my child's grasp and need for me. 

A few days into 'the break,' I realized I had not apologized to my daughter for thinking, wishing, hoping her leg was not broken and that she'd tough it out. We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner, she with her hot pink and purple-striped cast stuck out to the side of her chair. 

"I'm sorry I didn't believe you when you told me your leg hurt so much," I said. "I'm sorry I made you walk on it." It felt like a lot to admit.

She looked at me for a couple seconds, then looked down at her plate, then looked up at me again. For her to process this without a) asking more questions in return, or b) asking me to repeat it because she wasn't listening, spoke volumes.

"That's OK, Mama," she finally responded. "You just didn't know."