It’s Friday night, and I’m running around my neighborhood, barefoot, screaming, “Fig Newton!” at the top of my lungs, and shaking a prescription bottle over my head like a maraca. Usually when our dog runs away, the sound of his Prozac brings him home, and tonight is no exception. He streaks down the street like a bolt of lightning, skidding to a stop in front of our house. The look on his face reminds me of an obnoxious tween busted for snapping someone’s bra strap: Who, me?

I met Fig when he was twelve weeks old, a recent transport to New Jersey from a kill shelter in Georgia. I’d been lurking on Petfinder for months, much to the chagrin of my husband, who pointed out that—at two, five, and eight—our kids were practically puppies themselves. They weren’t even asking for a dog, and I’d never had one before. But when our eldest was born, we were living in a foreign country (fine, England) in a fifth floor walk-up (86 stairs!), with no family or friends nearby, and we survived. How hard could it be to raise a puppy?

When I first laid eyes on Fig, he was 12 weeks old, in a windowless room, in a cage by himself—the canine equivalent of solitary confinement. With no emotion in his voice, a shelter volunteer said, “You’ve heard of alpha dogs? This guy’s a beta, a total weirdo. His own brother wants to kill him.” The brother, Ernie, was in a neighboring cage, barking madly, teeth bared. I have a soft spot for underdogs with complicated family dynamics, so of course I fell madly in love with Fig’s red eyelashes and the way he placed one tawny paw on each of my shoulders. Our life together flashed before my eyes: long walks, meaningful gazes, lazy afternoons on the porch—basically an extended Viagra commercial starring a midsize orange dog and me.

Fig rode home on my lap, trembling and shedding half the fur on his body. Within an hour of arrival, he had shredded every roll of toilet paper in our house. When we put him in his crate, he cried so loudly—a keening, human-sounding scream—that one of neighbors called to ask if we needed an ambulance. My husband’s warning echoed in my head: Babies grow up. Dogs don’t.

Add up our kids’ tantrums, sleepless nights, deafening brawls, busted lips, and mysteriously disappearing socks, and the three of them have never been half as maddening or as worrisome as Fig was during his first year with our family. He didn’t just fail out of obedience school, he flat-out refused to participate. When we hired a private trainer ($175 per hour), he raised one eyebrow and went back to pacing around the coffee table for eight hours a day. He went on hunger strikes and chewed through three leashes (two canvas, one leather). We bought Fig a backpack ($32) to wear on walks; the trainer said it would give him a sense of purpose. He was petrified of running water, so we bought him a compression vest ($45) to wear when we showered or washed the dishes or when it rained. The trainer explained that kill shelters often cram several litter of puppies in one cage and essentially power wash them with high pressure hoses; no wonder the poor guy wouldn’t set foot in our backyard. Eventually we got rid of our hose.