Potholes on the Road Less Traveled Chapter 2

Rewind back to February, 1998. 

On the surface, we appeared to have an ideal life.

We lived in a three story, historic-register house in Almonte, a picturesque small town only a 30 minute commute to my office in Ottawa. Pocket doors between two enormous parlours. Oak wainscoting throughout. Built-in china and linen cupboards. Fireplaces upstairs and down. A glass-walled sunroom that overlooked the acre of gardens, majestic 50 foot tall black walnut trees, ornamental pond and swimming pool. All of it surrounded by an antique iron fence with big stone gates. Our poor man’s Kennedy compound included a rustic brick potting shed and a two-story carriage house/garage, with a full basement under it. The carriage house was connected to the house by a tunnel. How cool was that? I was living in an episode of “Dream House”.

The house was hardly big enough to contain all of the stuff we had collected over the years – antiques, art, musical instruments, thousands of books, fine china, silver and crystal, my antique doll and toy collection, John’s model trains and train memorabilia.

Our two sons had grown up and left home years before, so we enjoyed these glories free of worries about day care and teenage delinquency.

John had left his profession as a trade mark agent/lawyer a few years before. Because he sold out of his partnership for a modest pile of money, and I was earning a healthy mid-six figure income, he was now free to pursue whatever took his fancy. 

I was a lawyer and a partner in the Ottawa office of a prestigious international law firm headquartered on Bay St. in Toronto. My office had huge windows, and was furnished with heavily polished mahogany furniture, lightened by plants and art. I enjoyed the capable services of a full time assistant who had been with me for ten years. Brenda was also my dear friend.

My Ottawa partners were, by and large, amiable, intelligent and humorous men and women who (again, by and large) respected each other and me. Many of them and the staff were my friends. I had been with this firm since I articled, 13 years before. I was a litigator in the corporate/commercial field, and I had been privileged to be assigned to major cases and major clients on my own or in conjunction with senior partners, almost since I started with the firm. I had been made a partner at the earliest possible date allowed for by the partnership agreement. I had a respectful and amicable professional relationship with many of the city’s leading lawyers and judges. For me at least, there had been no glass ceiling.

More important than any of this, I was married to that finest (and I sometimes thought, rarest) of all breeds of men: one who admires and respects intelligent, strong women. John and I fell in love when he was 20. He thought I was 18 or 19. I was actually 15, which came as a huge shock to him.

We were always off by ourselves in intimate, intense conversation. He told me once that he knew we were destined to be together when he asked me if I believed in God, and I returned a provocative, nuanced answer instead of a shocked, “Of course!” John wrote me poetry. We fell in love over exchanges of ideas before we progressed to exchanges of body fluids. Mere physical passion was nothing to the blazing light of our spiritual union.

Hey, we were young and therefore, by definition, full of ourselves.

When I became pregnant at 17, reality intruded into our dream romance. We got married over the virulent, angry objections of my mother. Twenty-nine years later, in 1998, John and I were still each other’s best friend in the world despite some very rocky times in our relationship. We had each other’s back and nothing would ever change that.

Here’s the punchline. 

I was miserable. So, by the way, was John. But that was of far less importance than the fact that I was miserable. John spent much of his life in a state of dark Byronic brooding. It was part of his appeal. That I, little Miss Sally Sunshine, should be miserable, was a new, unexpected and disturbing state of affairs for both of us.

I loved the law. My years in law school had been some of the happiest and most satisfying of my life. I loved delving into the logical intricacies and sifting through the legal precedents involved in a particularly convoluted case. I loved the practice of law. Standing in a courtroom opposite a worthy opponent before an intelligent and engaged judge, thinking on my feet, answering objections and coming up with arguments on the fly was exhilarating and challenging.

But the business of law was fast overtaking, overshadowing and spoiling every pleasurable aspect of my life and career.

I had the things that I was supposed to want; that I thought I had wanted. But for several years I had increasingly felt that I was an actor playing the lead role in my own life; my posh office and the courtrooms I inhabited a stage set, my beautiful clothes merely costumes, my framed degrees and professional memberships, leather litigation bag, stunning house and possessions simply the stage dressing.

I had achieved success, only to find that success felt an awful lot like a straitjacket.

So when this story opens in February of 1998, I was miserable, and had been increasingly miserable for the preceding two years at least. I was so desperate that I had even agreed to pursue therapy for depression, something that was unthinkable in my family.

I had not been in the office for two months, because just after Christmas of 1997, I had fallen down our massive oak staircase and smashed up my ankle. This required surgery, the insertion of a metal plate and the application of a cast from groin to ankle, said cast weighing roughly 500 pounds. Added to the 90 or so pounds I had gained during my descent into abject misery over the previous few years, getting up from a chair at that point pretty much required a hoist.

The night I came home from the hospital, eastern Ontario suffered an epic ice storm that lasted days. We lost power to the house, meaning we had no heat and no lights as temperatures proceeded to dip to record lows.

Watching our ancient walnut trees crash to the ground outside while my cast and I sat shivering at the window in the dark freezing house, seemed like a fitting metaphor for my life.

By February of 1998, I was in a smaller cast and could walk with crutches, so when an order came down from High Command requiring all partners to attend an important meeting on ‘Strategic Planning’, I forced myself to go in to the office.

This was the latest campaign by the Central Governing Politburo in Toronto (also known as the firm’s Executive Committee) to force us lazy slackers in Ottawa to get the lead out and bill ever increasing amounts to ever more important clients in order to establish, once and for all dammit, our firm’s total supremacy over any and all other law firms in Toronto.

Or in Canada, for that matter, except that the Bay St. Central Governing Politburo, while it may have heard fantastical stories of strange, underpopulated, faraway lands that were rumoured to be part of Canada, didn’t much believe in the existence of them. Well, except for Calgary. They all knew where the oil patch was. 

And when the firm opened offices in New York and London, the orgasmic cries from the the Politburo could practically be heard in Ottawa.

The meeting was led by our latest pack of high priced consultants under the fond eye of one of the up and coming Young Turk partners from the Toronto office. The discussion was characterized by what seemed to me at least, a total lack of logic. A truly impressive, Alice in Wonderland kind of dizzy ability to expound two mutually contradictory ideas at the same time, while also displaying a blithely insouciant disregard for the plain facts of business life in Ottawa.

Not to mention the depressing corollary that quality of life played less than no part in these deliberations. To admit to such petty desires as focusing on home, hearth, and the enjoyment of the fruits of our labours was to announce oneself to be a weakling and a whiner; clearly an inferior order of being.

I seemed to be the only one of my Ottawa partners who was profoundly bothered by the fact that this emperor had no clothes. When the meeting was over, I sought out the heads of our litigation and corporate/commercial departments and passionately argued that we should split off from the Toronto juggernaut and reconstitute ourselves and anyone who wanted to go with us, back into the firm as it had been when I joined it, pre-Bay St. merger. That shop was an eminent Ottawa law firm with a proud history stretching back over fifty years and a humane and human approach to the practice of law. My partners responded with the equivalent of a kind pat on the head and earnest advice to take more time off.

Driving home, I was seized with the absolute conviction that it was only a matter of time before the firm realized that I was not swallowing the Koolaid, following which, I would inevitably be purged from the Party.

I would like to be able to say that this realization of impending doom fired up my courage and resolution to previously undiscovered heights. The less than heroic reality was, that in addition to being depressed, I was now more terrified than I had ever been in my life (with the sole exception of the day I had to tell my formidable mother that at 17, I was pregnant by the young man she despised). I was utterly convinced that life was over. It went beyond rational fear.  

I have no idea what, exactly, I thought was going to happen. John and I were two people of imagination, determination and intelligence. This isn’t hubris. I scored in the 96th percentile on my LSAT exam and graduated third in my law school class, notwithstanding the considerable inconvenience presented by breaking my neck in a car accident at Christmas in my last year. What can I say? I’m accident prone (especially around Christmas apparently). I was in halo traction for three months and missed all of my last term lectures.

We had five university degrees between us. We had money in the bank and equity in the house. Even if worst came to worst and we lost everything we had acquired, well, we had been poor before. While I subscribe to the belief that rich (okay, moderately well-to-do) is infinitely better than poor, neither was I so shallow that I didn’t know that as long as we had each other (and hopefully, a TV satellite dish, a library card, and now I would add, wifi), we could be happy even living on minimum wage in a double-wide trailer in the bush. Maybe happier than we presently were.

Notwithstanding all of these indisputable facts, I felt as if I had finally fallen into the gaping black chasm that I had been teetering over for months.

On being put in possession of the pleasing intelligence that the wife of his bosom was having a nervous breakdown, John reacted with his usual sangfroid in a crisis. Hugging me tightly, he told me soothingly not to worry, that everything would be alright. When I hysterically demanded to know what we were to do now, he replied that he had no idea, but he was sure that we’d think of something. 

“Cheer up,” he remarked with his trademark invincible optimism. “In thirty years we’ll both be dead anyway.”

Since I didn’t seem to immediately grasp how this was supposed to make me feel better, he offered a bracing addendum. “If the Mayans prove right and the world ends in 2012, we’ll be dead even sooner.”

Strangely, this failed to cheer. 

I called my therapist to hysterically demand further and better medications. Then, on the working theory that we would soon be destitute and out on the street anyway, I called our real estate agent to list the house. My contribution to our future thus satisfactorily concluded, I took to my bed. There I pondered the seemingly unanswerable questions of how I had arrived here, where “here” was, and how to get from “here” to “there”, wherever “there” was. I concluded, depressingly, that I had few skills to offer in the workplace terra incognita that fell between arguing cases in the Court of Appeal and flipping burgers at a fast food chain. 

However, as the days slipped past, a kind of fatalistic calm was superimposed over the black cloud that surrounded me. I gave up trying to control things (or, more accurately, my delusion that I was, or ever could be, in control of anything), and decided to let life take me where it would. I came to the stunningly obvious conclusion that the sun would still rise tomorrow, and barring the Rapture or nuclear holocaust, I would still be here whether or not I had formulated a grand plan. Being as how this was Canada, the government would ensure that we wouldn’t starve to death in a ditch. I was still depressed, but no longer in a blind panic.

I couldn’t decide if this was progress or just the further and better medications kicking in.

Then, finally, a faint glimmer of light penetrated my nihilistic darkness. Lying in bed, having my discouragingly familiar inner argument about whether or not there was any point in getting up, I realized that the one thing that would always get me moving eventually, was the necessity to walk the dogs. Moreover, the one thing in my life that I could look back on with simple, uncomplicated pleasure was my relationship with animals. 

Well, to be perfectly honest, animals and food. Food figures in lot of my happy memories.

My family always had dogs. The first one I remember was Skipper, a German shepherd who was acquired to be a guard dog for the small gas bar and diner my parents owned. She was treated as a member of our family and was especially close to us four kids. She was the illegal recipient of unwanted food from us at the dinner table, an enthusiastic participant in games of tag or hide-and-go seek, and the uncomplaining wearer of costumes my sister Sheryl and I would put on her. She was prone to jumping into bed with visiting relatives and sitting on their chests. I cried for weeks when she died, and had vivid dreams of her wearing a glowing angelic robe and wings.

We all collected strays of any ilk. Sheryl and I had a grasshopper circus in a big glass jar one summer. My brothers somehow ended up with a raccoon who lived in a huge cage in the yard, complete with tree branches and a shelter. This critter entertained us by washing every piece of food given to him in his water dish, even ice cream on bread.

One night, the raccoon escaped and got into the house. On hearing my mother’s screech, we all galloped into her bedroom to find her gabbling incoherently, clutching the university course work she had been doing in bed, and pointing at a furry grey and black creature sitting up on its hind legs regarding her with inquisitive interest. The eruption onto the scene of the whole family sent the raccoon scurrying off like his tail was on fire. Somehow he got between the walls and eventually into the attic and outside onto the roof, where, ignoring my brothers’ shouted pleas to him to come back, he was last spotted lighting out for the territories.

We moved to a small hobby farm outside of town when I was about eleven. There, we got our first cats, a black and white male called Sir Thomas Apache Purr and a black female who my mother christened Mahalia, after the black American singer, Mahalia Jackson. Racist as hell, I know, but I’m talking the early 1960’s here.

The name was actually a compliment. My mother was a crusader by nature and a big supporter of the civil rights movement, if only from afar. I still remember her telling us the story of Mahalia Jackson giving a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, when she was refused use of Constitution Hall by its owner, the Daughters of the American Revolution because only whites were allowed to perform there. Because of course. https://www.npr.org/2014/04/09/298760473/denied-a-stage-she-sang-for-a-nation

It could have been worse. John’s parents had two black cats named Amos and Andy.

In that more robust age, spaying and neutering of pets was not routinely done, litter boxes were non-existent and cats had free access to the outdoors. One early spring, Mahalia disappeared, as it seemed, for good. My mother advised us to prepare for the worst; that Mahalia wasn’t coming home.

****Trigger Warning: Bad things happen to pets****

Confounding expectations, our cat did re-appear. To our horror and I admit, fascination (we were kids after all), she was missing half of her left front leg. You could see the muscle and bone. We deduced that she had somehow been on the railway tracks behind our house, and had it cut off by the train. 

This wouldn’t be the only time one of our pets came to grief on the tracks. Sheryl had a colt named Goldie, who grazed with her mother in a field adjacent to the tracks and the railway trestle bridge that spanned the small creek on the border of our property. One day Sheryl went down to the field to say good morning to Goldie, as was her habit. A few minutes later, we were all galvanised by the sound of her terrified screams and ran to the windows to see her running across the field towards home. When she burst into the house, all she could say between hysterical sobs was, “Goldie has no head! Goldie has no head!”

My sister’s pony had gotten through the gap between the creek and the fence, had strayed out to the trestle bridge and gotten her legs hopelessly wedged between the railroad ties. She had been decapitated by the morning train. 

These days Sheryl, who was about fourteen at the time, would have been in therapy for the next ten years. On the farm in the early 1960’s, she was given the family’s condolences and left to get over it. She did get another pony though, when my parents received compensation from the railway. Willie was an adult Welsh pony who lived an uneventful and blameless life until my father finally sold her after my sister left for university.

Mahalia was luckier than Goldie. Her amputated stump was partially packed with straw and mud, as if Mahalia had thrust her bleeding, maimed leg into a hay mow or manure pile somewhere. The bleeding had miraculously stopped. My mother called the vet to make an appointment to have the cat euthanised. To Mom’s surprise, after listening to her description of the situation, the vet suggested that since the stump was not bleeding we leave it be and await developments. Mahalia had made it home after all, and was still alive despite impossible odds. She was eating and drinking.

“Let’s not take her chance at life away from her,” the vet urged. “Bring her in. I’ll clean up the wound, sew up the stump and we’ll see what happens.”

****End of bad stuff happening to pets****

Not only did Mahalia live, it was clear that her adventure had involved romance as well as that unfortunate encounter with a train. Mahalia was pregnant. The spring advanced and from her size, it became evident that Mahalia’s due date was approaching. My father banished her to the barn and strictly forbade us from bringing her in the house. He did not want the kittens born there. He knew that if they were, Mahalia would do everything in her power to make sure they stayed there. Of course, one particularly cold night, Sheryl and I disobeyed and smuggled Mahalia up to our room and the double bed we shared.

Sometime in the night, we awoke to a decidedly damp bed and the sound of faint mewing. Mahalia had crawled under the covers and was in the process of giving birth at the bottom of the bed.  Sheryl, always the intelligence officer of our little guerrilla sisterhood, declared that we had to move the kittens from the bed to one of the drawers in our dresser, from which we would remove our clothes and into which we would place some towels.

I hastened to obey her instructions, including making a foray downstairs to the kitchen, as quietly as I could, to retrieve the soup ladle. Why a soup ladle, you might reasonably ask? Because Sheryl had pronounced in sibyll-like fashion, that if we touched the kittens when they were so newly born, their mother might reject them.

How did she know this stuff, pre-Google?

The drawer was duly prepared. The kittens were solemnly transferred via ladle to its towel lined depths. Mahalia jumped in after them. We spread another towel over the mess in the bottom of our bed, and retired for the rest of the night.

In the morning we perforce confessed our sin. Dad merely sighed, shook his head and proceeded with the eviction of the mother and kittens back to the haymow in the barn. He spent the rest of the spring in a losing battle to keep them there, with Mahalia equally determined to transfer them, one after the other, back into the house. Of course, Sheryl, my two brothers and I surreptitiously encouraged her by opening the door whenever we saw her on her way in with a kitten, mewing in outrage, hanging by its neck from her determined maternal jaws. We thought it was hilarious. My father, not so much.

Such things were on my mind as I walked the dogs some thirty-five years later, pondering our future. An Idea was born.

When I returned, I remarked to John that I was thinking that it might be fun and rewarding to build an upscale dog and cat kennel that was less prison-like than those we knew, and try to run it in a way that would give the dogs and cats a more positive experience. I even had the crazy thought that we could create a place to which the dogs and cats might be happy to return.

I was shocked when John immediately said that we should do it.

John loved animals too, but he had an almost unbearable sensitivity towards them. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t walk into the adoption room at the Humane Society, because it was too painful for him to be confronted with the reality of all those dogs and cats who had no homes. The last time we went to a shelter to adopt a cat, he stayed outside the cat room and issued urgent instructions through a crack in the door, averting his eyes from the distressing scenes within. We ended up adopting not one, but three cats.

He was also a person of limited patience. Our late great Belgian Terverun sheepdog Toby, had been the love of my life. But to John, Toby was a constant trial, having a little more personality than John really wanted to cope with. He felt it was unjust that he should have to bodily eject the dog from the favoured of the three bathrooms in our house whenever he wanted some alone time with his newspaper in there. I would point out that there were other bathrooms, but neither he nor Toby were inclined to yield on that front.

I was therefore gobsmacked at his immediate positive reply to the suggestion that we should go into the dog and cat business. I didn’t want him to consider it only because he was desperate to see me happy again. He assured me that this was not the case. He knew what dog kennels were like in our area. He thought the idea of creating a new kind of facility and experience was genius.

Our first experience with kenneling came after I acquired my beloved Toby. The next time we decided to take a trip, it took a while for me to wake up and realize that I would need to find something to do with him. I had a vague notion that there were things called boarding kennels. I grabbed the Yellow Pages and started letting my fingers do the walking.

What criteria did I apply in choosing a boarding kennel for this puppy, who I loved almost as much as my husband and children?

Which one was closest to where we lived.

I was so naive, I had just assumed anyone who was in the business of caring for dogs, would be, you know, caring. I called the nearest kennel (we’ll call it Orange Blossom), and asked if they had space.

That’s it. That’s what I asked. Not, what kind of space will Toby be kept in? How many dogs do you take? How many walks a day will he get? Not, to my everlasting shame, “Can I come out and inspect your place?”

The big day arrived and I drove Toby to Orange Blossom Kennels. I’m sure my memory must be playing me false and it can’t really have been as bad as I recall. But what I remember is entering a structure so low that the ceiling almost brushed my head (I’m five feet, two inches tall), so dark it resembled a cave, and a dirt floor where small rickety cages were lined up in rows. Miserable looking dogs barked their heads off as we passed, or cowered in the furthest corner in the gloom.

Did I turn around and leave? No, I did not.

We had a plane to catch and I felt I had no alternative. I drove away feeling like an axe murderer. The whole (mercifully short) time we were away, I got to enjoy the awesome burdens of guilt and worry about leaving Toby in that hellhole. When I returned for my young dog, he was making weird retching sounds without actually vomiting. I took him to the vet, who diagnosed kennel cough. I related my experience with Orange Blossom Kennels and asked my vet for his recommendation about where to go next time I needed to board Toby.

He suggested a kennel at the other end of the city. This one was owned by vets, so although he had no personal experience with it, we both felt there was a good chance it would be the best the city had to offer. Owned by veterinarians after all. What could go wrong?

Next time we had to go away, I made a reservation for Toby at the vet-owned kennel. This time when I went to pick him up, he smelled so noxious I involuntarily recoiled a step when they brought him out. When I demanded to know why he smelled like he had been sleeping on a bed of dead skunks under a blanket of rotten fish, the staff member who had presented him to me said defensively, “We did bathe him.”

The message finally sank in to my dense brain that I needed to do more research if I had any hope at all of finding a place to leave Toby where I could be reasonably sure that he would be safe and comfortable. I’d pretty much given up on finding a place where he would be happy. If such a dream kennel was a reality, surely my vet would have known of it.

After a lot of phone calls and inquiries, I managed to track down a kennel of sorts about an hour’s drive away. It was run by an old guy called Gordon who had put a pot bellied stove in a small barn and constructed a handful of dog runs around it. This was the only place within driving distance where even one short walk a day was offered. The enclosures where the dogs were kept might have been rickety, but at least they were large and boasted wooden dog houses.

We took the dogs to Gordon’s ramshackle kennel for many years. As Toby got older though, he became stiff with arthritis and Gordon’s barn was not exactly toasty warm in the depths of a Canadian winter. It was also a long drive out there and since his operation was so small, Gordon often got booked up. I therefore ventured to ask our vet yet again if he could offer any ideas about boarding facilities. After all, we were now about ten years down the road from when we had first started boarding Toby. Surely the kennel industry must have come a long way during that time.

Yes! The vet was enthusiastic about a brand new boarding kennel not far from us. I believe he used the words “state of the art”. Next time we needed to board our dogs, I booked them there, even though I was informed that walks would be an extra cost. No matter, as long as the dogs would get walked.

We had three dogs by that point. I asked the kennel about Mac and Annie rooming together. She was our latest rescue. Annie looked like a smooth coated collie and was the most anxious, fearful, neurotic dog I have ever met. Even after living with us for eight years, she was afraid of John. If you moved a piece of furniture she wouldn’t go into that room for weeks. She was joined at the hip to Mac, a mixed breed shepherd type who we had adopted, her one source of security and comfort. I was assured Annie and Mac were welcome to share a “cage”.

That word should have been a tip off, but acting on the enthusiastic recommendation of our vet, and the assurance that this new kennel offered walks, I booked our three dogs.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected, but it wasn’t a warehouse full of four by four foot crates, and a deafening cacophony of noise. There had to have been at least a hundred cages in one large, windowless space. When the attendant opened a cage door and said, “I believe you wanted two of your dogs to share a space?” I replied that the cage barely looked big enough for Mac to even turn around in, let alone for Mac and Annie it share it. Faced with the choice of Mac and Annie being crammed together or exiling Annie to a cage on her own in this madhouse, I chose to put them together.

Another trip ruined by guilt and emotional turmoil over our dogs. On our return I discovered that the ‘walks’ we had paid for were not walks at all. Instead, the dogs were turned out into a narrow gravelled fenced alley adjacent to the kennel building, where they could play (or fight), or, as in Annie’s case undoubtedly, cower and shiver by the wall.

The idea of creating something new in the kennel business elicited the first spark of interest, passion and creativity that I had felt in what seemed like years. It was a tiny spark at first, but gradually, as I started researching information about boarding kennels, I started getting more and more interested. It was like waking up out of a long sleep filled with half-remembered bad dreams. The more I thought about it, and the more we talked about it, the more I became convinced that here, at last, was something that might just be the answer, for so many reasons.

First, it was something we could do together. John and I had spent the first five years of our married life at school together. In recent years, our office buildings had been within blocks of each other. We not only shared our commute, we had lunch together every day we could. John usually walked me back to my office, holding my hand.

Inexplicably to us, wanting to work together was viewed by others of our acquaintance as evidence, if any were wanting, of our complete lack of sanity. While some people envied and applauded us, others found it deeply suspicious and most unnatural. My brother-in-law, for example, wanted to know where we would go to get away from each other. 

Secondly, we could run a boarding kennel from our own property, providing we found the right place. With any luck, we would never again have to put on uncomfortable shoes or a jacket and tie, or fight rush hour traffic. And we would own the property we invested in, so our capital should be safe.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, we had confidence in our knowledge of animals and understanding of their owners.

John and I had acquired cats within six months of our marriage and had never been without at least one cat for more than six months since. I had raised and trained my difficult Toby from puppyhood, taking him through several levels of obedience and the conformation show ring, doing the brushing and grooming myself.

We had adopted dogs and cats from the Humane Society. We had raised a German shepherd puppy for a Seeing Eye Dog organisation. I had been a member of the Board of Directors of the Ottawa Humane Society, and a founding member of the Eastern Ontario Section of the Belgian Sheepdog Club of Canada. I had written an article on housebreaking that had been published in the Canadian Kennel Club magazine ‘Dogs in Canada Annual’. I had read extensively on all kinds of issues relating to dogs and cats. On such questions, I was the ‘go-to’ person for every one of our acquaintances.

Moreover, I felt in my bones that there must be people out there like us, who would gladly pay more to take their pets to a boarding facility that was dog and cat friendly in design and with programmes more interesting than what was currently available, at least in our area. When I strolled through the big pet superstores and saw the amount of money being spent on things like toys, beds, designer leashes and collars, I knew, without an expensive market research study, that boarding was an area of pet services that was being under-served, at least in Ottawa.

Finally, we had both been in law partnerships and had years of legal experience in areas that required us to know the ins and outs of business, including how to read balance sheets and financial statements and how legal regulations worked. Both John and I were well-equipped for the business aspects of being our own boss.

It looked like opening a high concept ‘pet resort’ might indeed be our answer. At this early stage, it was at least a catalyst that got me out of bed and charging ahead again.

We left ourselves open to other ideas too. The idea of getting paid to pursue our interests and hobbies with a doll store or train store or ‘doll and train’ store was attractive on its face. But what about the money we would invest in leasehold improvements and inventory that would be lost if we couldn’t make a go of it? What about the hours and hours we would be tied to the store? Did we really know enough about the market in giftware, dolls and/or model trains to confidently open a retail operation?

I loved to bake. And food. I think I mentioned food? We toyed with the idea of a tea room where I could exercise those culinary skills and John would manage the facility. But in addition to the concern that money invested in leasehold improvements and equipment would be lost if our business failed, there were the long hours spent baking in addition to the long hours spent actually running the tea room. I got a headache just thinking of the health and safety regulations that would have to be complied with.

Or we could open a bed and breakfast or small inn, invest in a vineyard and a sports car. That way we’d have the whole mid-life crisis cliché thing covered.

Maybe we would just say to hell with all of it, cash in our chips, buy that doublewide trailer in the backwoods and find jobs clerking at Home Depot or manning the doughnut machine at Tim Horton’s.

Underneath the excitement though, there lurked a dark current of anxiety and even disbelief. Were we really talking seriously about giving up the security of guaranteed big money? I was painfully aware that I had invested years to obtain a position, income, status and prestige that most people – certainly most women – could only dream of. Was I actually contemplating throwing it all away merely because I was unhappy?

I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, mocking the notion that “happiness” or “personal fulfillment” were things worth striving for. What was I? A freaking hippie? The Scottish Presbyterian ethic on which I had been raised said that the very last thing I should be thinking about was myself and my level of satisfaction with life. Only moral weaklings suffered depression. If our business failed to fulfill our hopes, it would be God’s punishment for our hubris.

What if we chased this fantasy and we were as miserable as ever? From a purely pragmatic point of view, there were no guarantees that whatever business we started would succeed. In fact we are only too well aware that a staggeringly high percentage of small businesses fail in their first few years.

All our bravado felt like whistling past the graveyard. I remember standing on the bank of the river that ran through our town, and saying to John, “Think of all the people in this tiny burg who make their living through some kind of little business. If they can do it, surely we can?” I was trying to persuade myself as much as him.

Yet there was another theme playing in my head, countering the voices that kept telling me this was an insane thing to do. That was the knowledge that I was only going to get one chance at this life. Whenever my rational mind presented me with images of possible bankruptcy and destitution, I would remember all the times I had hidden behind the closed door in my fancy office, while tears ran down my face and I fought an overwhelming sense of utter despair. Was that how I wanted to spend my days? Was any amount of money or status worth living my life that way? Something in me rebelled at the notion that I should accept misery as the necessary payment for all my worldly comforts and advantages.

Screw that. If we were to fail and be miserable, at least let us fail on our own terms, and by virtue of our own decisions. We would be in control of our business, not locked in to the decisions of others, with little or no say in how things were going to be. I finally began to understand that just because I was fortunate enough to be capable of being a well paid trial lawyer and partner in a high-powered firm, it didn’t mean I had to be. It didn’t mean it was the right way for me to live my life.

As I remarked to John one day when I was feeling particularly belligerent, “I want this on my gravestone: ‘She refused to live up to her potential’.”