My son turned nine on a wet Saturday in March, the kind of Dublin rain that seems too tired to fall properly and just hangs in the air. We had planned a small party in our flat in Drumcondra, with supermarket pizza, a chocolate cake from the bakery on Dorset Street, and six children making enough noise to convince the neighbours we had invited the whole school. He had been talking for months about what he would buy with his birthday money. A Lego set, he said first. Then a second-hand Nintendo Switch. Then a football jersey. His list changed every week, but the excitement stayed the same.
Two days before his birthday, we found a little dog near St Anne’s Park. She was trembling under a bench, soaked through, with one ear folded strangely and no collar. My son was the first to see her. He crouched down and spoke to her in the soft voice he usually saved for babies and injured insects. I told him not to touch her, partly because I was afraid she might bite, and partly because I was afraid of what it would cost if we got involved. That sounds awful, but money had been tight since Christmas. I was counting coins for bus fares and pretending it was all grand.
We rang a local rescue number, and a woman told us to wait with the dog if we could. My son took off his own jacket and laid it on the ground near her. He didn’t complain once about the cold. When the volunteer arrived, she scanned the dog for a chip, wrapped her in a towel, and told us she might end up at the DSPCA in Rathfarnham if no owner came forward. My son asked if she would be lonely there. The woman looked at him carefully and said, “Not if people keep caring.”
On the morning of his party, he opened his cards at the kitchen table. Ten euro from his granda in Cabra. Twenty from my sister in Swords. A little envelope from his godmother with a note saying, “Buy yourself something brilliant.” He stacked the notes beside his plate and stared at them while his cereal went soggy. I thought he was doing sums for the Lego set.
Then he said, “Mam, can I give it to the animals?”
I laughed at first because I thought he meant a few coins from the jar. “That’s lovely,” I said, “but you don’t have to give all of it.”
He shook his head. He has his father’s stubborn chin, though I try not to say that too often. “I want to give all of it. The dog didn’t have a birthday.”
I told him to think about it after the party. I told him people had given him that money for himself. I told him there would always be animals needing help, which was true, but also a convenient adult way of making a child’s goodness seem impractical. He listened politely, then pushed the pile of notes towards me as if it might run away.
At the party, he didn’t mention it to the other children. He blew out his candles, got chocolate icing on his sleeve, and played football in the narrow strip of grass behind the building until everyone’s socks were wet. But that evening, when the last child had gone home and the flat smelled of crisps and balloons, he brought me a shoebox. Inside was the birthday money, a drawing of the little dog, and a note in careful pencil: “For food, blankets and minding them.”
I cried in the bathroom so he wouldn’t see. Not because I was proud, though I was. I cried because I had spent so long worrying about what I couldn’t give him that I had missed what was already growing in him. I had wanted to protect him from disappointment, from bills, from the sharp edges of
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
