We are a pet-owning family, at times shading dangerously close to a loss-making petting zoo. My childhood was filled with tales of the livestock arcadia my father assembled before I was born – goats, ferrets, frogs and a dog called Ratty that had escaped from a circus – and even though my own pets were less thrilling, that menagerie shaped my vision of family life: a happy, chaotic tumble of fur and fowl. Happily, I met a man who felt the same way and in our time together we have shared stewardship over everything from a violent elderly rabbit rescued – in hindsight probably against its will – from the local park to a giant African land snail and all points between, as well as our two sons. It has often been absolutely terrible. This experience allows me to attempt to debunk here for you some of the myths that surround family pets.

A dog is a wonderful playmate for children

I love our dog Oscar for many reasons: his amusing fear of cardboard boxes, his silky ears and the undignified way he sleeps, legs wide apart (“like a Playgirl centrefold,” my stepfather says). There is, however, a problem and it is Whippet Resting Face. The expression of a whippet in repose is a complex blend of judgment, disdain and reproach and while his stony little face probably isn’t really disapproving of everything we do, it certainly feels like that. On the upside, this has prepared me well for my current life with teenagers. On the downside, we have been cheated of the canine fun times and adoration we were promised. Oscar tolerates our attempts to play with him with stony forbearance at best and eschews cuddling. It’s not just us he disdains either. “He’s shy,” I lie apologetically at the park as he stares straight ahead, baleful and rigid, while a delightful puppy tries to induce him to frolic. Mostly, he sits stiffly in the furthest corner of our house glaring around like a disapproving great uncle. We’re used to Oscar now, but he’s not exactly the life and soul of the party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emma, Theo, Louis and Oscar. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian

There are low-maintenance pets

Everyone knows that children, however well-intentioned, will be no help whatsoever after the first three heady days of pet ownership but, thankfully, people claim, pets don’t need to be hard work. Wrong. Take tortoises. In the 1970s you put a tortoise in the garden, watched it potter about nibbling dandelions then stored it in a cardboard box all winter as per Blue Peter’s instructions.

Today’s tortoise is Mariah Carey-level demanding. Ours require weekly weigh-ins and baths in something called ReptoBoost. They hibernate in their own mini-fridge – marginally better than when they were stacked in our crisper drawer – and I have to grate cuttlefish over their greens, like a solicitous Italian waiter wielding parmesan. Tortoise care reached a paroxysm of awfulness with our red-footed specimen, Julius, who suffered a condition described by our vet, delicately, as “an erection gone wrong”. The bulbous salutation – vast, unforgettable, sex-life blighting – had to be corrected surgically and thereafter I was tasked with massaging iodine on to the ... remains. There is nothing like massaging the surgical wound site where a distressed tortoise’s genitals used to be multiple times a day to make you question your life choices. Did the children help? No. Was it all worth it? No. Julius succumbed to post-operative infection anyway, which brings me on to …

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Louis and tortoise.

Pets teach your children important lessons about death

The gentler sorrow you feel at a pet’s demise is a healthy preparation for later human bereavement, the theory goes. Well. My younger son’s chickens have taught him that death comes out of nowhere, inexplicably, when you are in the prime of life and it takes your favourites. My elder son’s rats have taught him that death comes too soon, but is unbearably prolonged and frightening. You will agonise and wonder if you are doing the right thing and never quite know if you did. I thought the main advantage of rodents was that you were pretty much guaranteed to find them stiff in the bottom of their cage one morning without warning. Not so our rats, whose hideously slow demise meant bedside vigils with my distraught son, cage-side vigils at the vet’s (“visiting hours are 4pm-6pm,” he said, encouragingly, and I didn’t want to seem heartless) and more evenings Googling “DIY euthanasia rats” than I care to enumerate.

Our pets have influenced my own attitude to death, by which I mean I am making a living will because my husband is of Normandy farming stock and those people do no agonising whatsoever. “He’s so brisk about it all,” I confided to a friend, standing in the vet’s visiting room with the second of our ailing rodents, under the mournful eye of a pug in a cone of shame, 14 cats and an iguana.

“I’m starting to worry he’ll be like that with me. You know, I’ll break my leg and he’ll be all ‘Just pull the plug, let’s get this over with.’”

A dog will fix your relationship

Obviously getting a dog is a lower risk option than having a baby when things are shaky, but it is emphatically not the answer. We got Oscar at a tough time, hoping, I think, that he would give us a shared project and something positive to focus on, but actually he amplified our differences. I was happy for him to sleep in our bed, eat off my plate and gnaw my slippers, while my husband wanted rules and was appalled by the advancing tide of squalor and chaos.

Puppy ownership revealed us to each other in a harsher light: he was anxious and uptight; I was an irresponsible slattern with scant regard for hygiene, snippy and unwilling to compromise when challenged.

We split less than a year after Oscar’s arrival. Predictably, he took it badly, going on a food-stealing bender, whimpering for hours and peeing in every corner of the kitchen (we weren’t much better ourselves).

When we eventually got back together (no thanks to any cinematic canine intervention), Oscar’s confusion and distress was such that at one point when I was walking with him between our two homes, he literally sat down in the middle of the street and refused to go in either direction. Back together in one house now, it is plain that we can neither move nor ever split up again, so perhaps on some level Oscar has “fixed” us, whippet style: with emotional blackmail.

Urban chickens are brilliant

When my son insisted he wanted chickens for his 10th birthday I was unconvinced: chickens, idiotic, smelly, and raucous, were no part of my dream menagerie. Nevertheless, some part of me – I’m going to call it “the stupid part” – thought they might be fun so we acquired two anonymous brown hens in a cardboard box from a man with few teeth and a strong entrepreneurial streak.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theo with one of the hens.

Within days of their arrival I had fallen for them, hard. I don’t know why. Eggs are nice, but hens are smelly and raucous. They also show no affection, have reduced our small back garden to a scale replica of Passchendaele and wake me – and the entire neighbourhood – at 6am with their vociferous complaining.

Our newest hen, Pepper, compounds this by escaping daily, then lurking near the back door so she can fly up and peck me in the face. Nevertheless, I am infatuated (far more so than my son, who likes his hens, but believes that I have become “weird”).

I spend my free time and income on grooming and nutritional esoterica from hen pervert websites and bring bourgeois shame on the Normandy farming part of the family (for whom a chicken is essentially lunch) by taking them to the vet for their various infections and infirmities.

Urban chickens are a sickness, an addiction, a gateway drug to more chickens. I will continue down the path to chicken perdition until one day I wake up having turned into the Duchess of Devonshire, except destitute, friendless and living in a field of guano.

Pets bring you closer together

Maybe I should ask my stepfather about this. Did the weeks he and I spent jointly evacuating our guinea pig’s ulcer, me holding the plaintively ululating front end, him grimly squeezing the infected back end bring us closer together? I don’t know; he doesn’t like to talk about it.

But our pets, source of tension, resentment and chaos as they may be, at least give us something to complain about together and there is no stronger bond than shared grumbling in our household.

We commiserate about the time Oscar ate a whole fish pie with predictably hideous results, or the time we lost the hedgehog and eventually found it, bloated but happy, in a giant bag of dog food.

My father and I compare notes on our respective rodent trapping campaigns, my three nights crouched in the bathroom trying to lure an escaped rat out from the skirting mirroring his week-long battle against a feral hamster 30 years earlier, triumphantly extracting it from the external wall of the house with only a jam jar, peanuts and guile.

Whether we’re clearing up vomit, hiding cardboard boxes or trying to stop a tortoise from mating with our shoe, our relationship with pets is peculiarly comforting, in some ways. They are as exasperating, gross and self-destructive as any other family member, but we love and tolerate them in spite of – even because of – their flaws. Perhaps there’s hope for us humans, too.

Now pass me that copy of Practical Poultry.

• We’ll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington is published by Macmillan, £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846