But that was a long time ago, when a picture book I wrote, There’s a Bird on Your Head, an embrace-your-weirdness manifesto, became a surprise cult classic and then an animated PBS television series. I’d never imagined, as an art history major in college and then in the early part of my career when I was working for Black Bear Books, the children’s book division of a big New York publisher, that I would ever earn that much. During those good years, everyone told me I would go from success to success, that money and opportunity would keep rolling in. But they didn’t. Life is like that. It’s a series of advancements and regressions, the same tide, coming and going, giving and taking away. A secret part of me still believes the current will come back in after all these dry years. But the bigger part wakes up in the middle of the night wondering what will become of the four of us—Gary, Teddy, Charlotte, and me—if it doesn’t.

“Content-generation,” the work I do now, feels like another regression, another failure, but Gary and I aren’t getting any younger and there are bills to pay, so I pursue it with nothing short of desperation. Doing just enough is enough, I tell myself when I pick a topic, knock out a few glib paragraphs, search for the perfect gauzy stock photo of a piece of avocado toast or the silhouette of a silver-haired forty-year-old doing yoga on a wood deck at sunset, then pause to come up with a suggested click-bait headline before hitting “send” and starting another. Magic is everywhere, even in content-generation, like when fabric clogs on a foot model make the perfect visual point for your “Does working at home make you less attractive?” post. Maybe this new career will magically lead me somewhere, to the next step in my proverbial journey, to a pot of gold at the end of a nonexistent rainbow. It’s the fantasy of being saved that keeps me going.

The question of where to put my laptop since my lap is now occupied by the dog is an adjustment at first, until I realize that I don’t actually have to have the dog on my lap—Charlotte can be half on my hip and half on the bed. This isn’t an Olympic sport, after all. There are no rules, no mandatory movements or positions, no points taken off for bad form. I can make it up as I go along, just like I do with my work. “Are dogs the ultimate antidepressant?” “Can dogs ease empty-nester heartache?” Anything is possible with a well-placed question mark and an endless supply of dubious functional MRI conclusions available from a simple Google search. Any thought, question, or half-baked idea of mine can become a Well/er piece.

About an hour before it’s time to pick Teddy up from school and before Gary gets home from work, I take Charlotte off, hide the sling in the middle drawer, and bring her out to do all the things a normal dog should be allowed to do in the course of a normal dog-day—including a long walk—slingless, on and off the leash, in the neighborhood or around the reservoir that we drive to, where she gets to play and socialize with other dogs. Once home, she finds a place to nap on the floor or on the bed or on the couch before I leave. The afternoons and evenings pass easily, usually—laundry, cooking, a little more content-generation distracting me from missing the weight around my neck, against my hip, balancing my laptop next to that warm cotton sack of dog fur.