Angelina Jolie once said it was her son Maddox who adopted her, and not the other way around. She said his three-month-old smile gave her a confidence she had never known.

“I held him for the longest time, and finally he woke up and stared at me, and we stared at each other, and I was crying and he smiled and I felt… my discomfort with children is because I assume I can’t make them happy, because I’ve been accused of being dark I wasn’t sure I’d be a great, loving, perfect mom even though I wanted to be so bad. Could I make someone comfortable and happy? But he smiled and we hung out for a few hours, and I could make him happy, and we felt like a family.”

That was from a 2005 Vanity Fair interview to promote Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I thought of it a year later, at the Humane Association, when a scruffy mutt nuzzled his way onto my lap with such boundless affection that I felt confident in my ability to be his mom. “I want him,” I told my husband.

I was 22 and married to a man who I disliked far more than I loved. We bought a house the week before our wedding and adopted Grizzly the month after.

Grizzly was like my ex: high-strung, mildly racist, obnoxiously whiny. He was also like me. His hair shed everywhere and he shared my four-second attention span. He had my brown complexion and my ex’s dark eyes. If he was upset, he could cry for hours, wallowing and pining in a fitting soundtrack to his parent’s relationship. I was too young for marriage, and my ex was overbearing and insecure. We were toxic.

When we divorced a year and a half later, I found myself loving my single life. I would drop Grizz with my parents for entire weekends. During the week, I’d come home from work, let him outside to go to the bathroom, and then run back off to do whatever my heart fancied. We went on fewer walks. I stopped taking him to the Bark Park. I was selfish with my time.

Grizzly knew how to tell time. A girlfriend moved in with me shortly after the divorce and marveled at how excited he’d become in the 10-15 minutes before I would walk through the door. When I arrived, he’d wrap his paws around my shoulders, standing up on his hind two legs to hug me. His body was so long and lanky–he had the Robert DeNiro moles of a German Shepard, but the distinct build of a greyhound–that I can still picture the way he hovered over the kitchen counter to steal food.

He delighted in car rides to my parent’s house, where they spoiled him like the first grandchild he was. He once jumped out of the window as we pulled up to the Bark Park, and I cried in fear as he shrugged it off and hopped back in. He was so hyper and anxious, a vet prescribed doggy Valium that sat in my car for months before I tossed it out. When we went for walks, neighbors would always ask, “Who’s walking who?”

I was young and self-centered, and he deserved better. Big A deserved better, too. I was 26 when she was born, and when I die, I know I’ll have to atone for how awful I was during her first few years.

I derided her for being a terror at bedtime, even submitting her photo for the G-rated version of Go the F to Sleep, but it was me who made the process a nightmare, yelling and screaming and playing Candy Crush on my cell phone as she reached for a tighter hug.

I felt I had something more to do, some place better to be. I didn’t know how to hold the life I had created and bask in her sacred love. In my ugliest moments, I wondered if Mr. D’s father could see me from the heavens, and if he, too, winced at my shitty, selfish entitlement.

Mr. D never called me out for being awful, but there were times when I saw myself in his eyes, and worse still, in my own. It was somewhere after Little A’s birth, after the pothead in me returned, that I found myself appreciating the precious intimacy of those last few hours of daytime consciousness.

It’s been nearly two years since Grizzly passed away, and my parenting of him is one of my great regrets. “Did I give him a good life?” I ask Mr. D, who always answers, “He was a happy dog and knew how much you loved him.”

Did he? My new obsession is with the cat. Mr. Fayz (pronounced Faze) is social and constantly intrigued by gravity… or he’s just an asshole who loves watching half-filled glasses of water spill to the ground. He has unbridled energy and a near sadistic playfulness that cause the A’s to live in constant fear of his scratches.

He needs a brother, I keep telling Mr. D. “Just a companion.” He’s too much of an extrovert to spend so much of the day alone, I say. We could never treat a dog the way we treat him. We’re too mired in the everyday hustle to give him more of our time, so why not give him a better life?

“Well, would it really be better?” Mr. D asks. “What if a new cat completely shifts the dynamic or changes his personality?”

And then I start to wonder, is this even about the cat? Is his life a metaphor for my own? Should our family be frolicking on a beach in Hawaii right now? Could our love survive it? If Time is all we have, are we spending it wisely?