How My Dog Helped Me to Start Over After Divorce

This month, my chocolate Labrador, Rock, turns ten. Ten years of walks, of routines, of one brown face waiting at the door — and ten years since he arrived at one of the darkest chapters of my life. He is the reason it stayed a chapter and not the whole story.

Let me locate you in that moment. It was 2016, my second year of running a business. I was living in an apartment so dark it barely deserved to be called a living space — one gate-covered window that never showed the sun, one tiny window facing a wall, both so dirty they looked like they hadn't been cleaned since the building was built.

And for the first time in my life, no one was handing me a plan. I had never once had to make my own, and I was realizing I didn't know how.

I had been scheduled my entire life. From second grade, I rode the bus to elementary school by myself. Later it was the subway and a bus to an Upper East Side private school, then college, then grad school, then years in corporate — an unbroken chain of places I was expected to be and times I was expected to be there. Even my summers were spoken for: an internship, a policy program, a church camp, always something. Over-scheduled people are never forced to ask the harder question — what would I do with a day that belonged entirely to me? Entrepreneurship asked it every single morning.

I got up and did the work anyway. Self-motivating in the dark — literally and otherwise — is its own kind of labor, and I was doing it at a time when my marriage was teaching me things I didn't want to learn.

Rock was a gift from my then-husband, offered in the wake of a disappointment I won't relitigate here. I have made peace with the irony: the hardest chapter of my life handed me its own remedy.

I picked him up off a farm, and he smelled like horse dung. The first thing we did together was take a bath. On the drive home he shivered the entire way, curled into my arms — this tiny, trembling creature who had just left everything he knew, pressed against a woman who had no idea what she was doing. Neither of us knew it yet, but we were both starting over.

I won't romanticize what came next, either. I had never lived with a dog, and nothing about the goldfish and parakeet of my past had prepared me for a Labrador puppy. Learning to be a caregiver for a small being who relied on me for everything was genuinely hard, at a moment when I felt I had nothing extra to give. The pee on the floor. The poop that somehow found its way across entire rooms. When I'd come home from work to find he'd messed up, he would hide in a corner — and I could tell he felt bad, that even then, all he wanted was to make me happy. He is still that dog. To this day, even when he's sick, he gives me his sad puppy-dog eyes whenever he gets something wrong — his version of an apology, offered every time.

But Rock also came with something I desperately needed and could not manufacture alone: a rhythm. He had to eat at certain times. He had to go out at certain times. He did not care about my ambivalence toward the morning; the morning was non-negotiable.

So we walked. Central Park, early, every day. For the first time in months I was standing in sunlight before nine a.m. — not because I had willed myself into wellness, but because a dog needed me there. I left the apartment in darkness and came back ready to build.

The walks became runs. When I trained for the 2017 New York City Marathon, Rock became my training partner, joining me for the short runs and keeping me motivated on the mornings I would have talked myself out of. I watched him go from a puppy who could barely make it up the stairs to an athlete pacing me through the park, and it changed how I saw him. I started teaching him tricks and became fascinated by how quickly he picked up new skills — his progression became a hobby of mine, and he became the best hobby, friend, and everything else a girl could ask for.

Then the marriage ended, and I kept Rock in the divorce.

That sentence is lighter than the season it describes. I went from feeling like part of a family to feeling profoundly alone — and Rock was the one constant on the other side of that threshold. When I moved across the country to Miami for my fresh start, he moved with me, sitting beside me on the plane like he understood we were doing this together. He pressed himself against me when I cried, which was often. On the days I could not imagine getting out of bed, I got out of bed, because he needed to be walked and fed and loved, and he was not interested in my reasons.

In Miami, we walked the beach every day. I would let him off the leash and he would run straight into the ocean — a chocolate Lab in full sprint toward the water he has loved his entire life. And in the water, Rock smiles. A real one, mouth wide open, every tooth showing, the happiest face I have ever seen on any living creature. He would swim, come back, shake off, and later cover my entire apartment in sand. It was horrible to clean. It was also, every single day, worth it. That smile took me outside of myself, outside of the pain of that transition. There is a particular grace in being needed by someone who has no idea you're falling apart, and another kind entirely in being made to laugh by him.

He also became, without my planning it, the most reliable character test I have ever administered. When I began dating again, I watched how people treated Rock, and Rock told me everything. One date told me they hated Rock and wished he didn't exist — out loud, to my face, about my best friend. Another begged to buy me a new dog, as if ten years of loyalty could simply be replaced, and others were genuinely threatened that he had come from my ex — jealous, somehow, of a Labrador. Each of them was showing me exactly how they would eventually treat me. But one night I came home from a date to find that Rock, who was sick, had pooped all over the apartment. While I tended to him, my date — without being asked, without a single complaint — cleaned up every bit of it. That was the evening I understood what the test was really measuring. How someone treated my dog was how they would care for me: in the mess, in the inconvenience, in the moments nobody performs for.

Rock led me to the right partner, too. From the beginning, he was loving and attentive to Rock — inventing new ways to entertain a chocolate Lab whose energy has never once matched his age, buying doggy seasonings to make his meals interesting, stepping in to care for him without being asked when my work and travel schedule got heavy. A few months into dating, I noticed the language had changed: Rock had become "our dog." He was telling people "we have a chocolate lab." One Halloween, the three of us wore coordinated costumes as a family. The right partner didn't just tolerate Rock. He loved him on purpose.

What surprises me most, ten years in, is his range. One of my great-grandmothers had no experience with dogs, and when I first brought Rock to visit, her position was firm: he would be sleeping outside. Then outside became the living room floor. The living room floor became an invitation into whatever room we were in. Eventually she was the one putting out water for him before we arrived. My great-grandmother, who had never been a dog person in her long life, adored visits with him until she passed. My other grandparents went further — they started cooking him his own special meals and played fetch with him in the pool and would surprise me with dog treats for him. One chocolate Lab, converting an entire family line. He makes strangers smile in elevators. He rubs his head against people he has known for thirty seconds. He has softened rooms, and generations, and me.

These days, the care runs in both directions, and I am intentional about his side of the ledger. Rock gets his daily walks, no matter what my calendar says. He gets swim time at friends' homes in the Hamptons, because a water dog should never have to retire from water. He eats organic food and treats. He goes to a daycare that loves him — where, I will have you know, he has won costume contests. There is a special dog bed in every room of our apartment, so he never has to choose between comfort and company. And there are cuddles. Lots and lots of cuddles. He spent ten years taking care of me. Making his life good is the least I can do.

And he built the businesswoman I became. What Rock taught me in that dark apartment is the same principle I now teach founders and executives: results are not driven by bursts of brilliance but by steady, consistent, unglamorous action — the walk you take whether or not you feel like it. My whole life, structure had been imposed on me. Rock showed me that structure could be built around something I loved. One is compliance. The other is devotion. Only one of them compounds.

Ten years later, the business has grown into things I could not have imagined from that apartment, and Rock — grayer at the muzzle now — still sets the rhythm of my mornings. People call him my dog. That has never felt like the right word for what he is. He is my best friend, my witness, and the first great partnership of my adult life.

Happy birthday, Rock.