The couple in New York City with Delta at Central Park.

My husband, Nate, and I used to assume we’d have kids. We were both from the Ozarks and married young – plenty of time.

But as our friends began to replace papasans and beer bongs with bouncy swings, we instead moved to New York City and later New Orleans (and then back to New York City). We got our first passports. I got a staff job at a magazine and found my career to be exhilarating.

As we grew up together, we fell more in love, but the desire for children never arrived.

By the time we had been married for 11 years, I was 35 years old and Nate was 37 – the age range my friends were dubbing the “closing door moment”.

We knew we should make a final decision about what our family would look like. Did I need to freeze my eggs? Did I even have eggs? How would children fit into the life of a travel writer? Did we want children at all?

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While many people I knew were catching baby fever, I ached for a dog, and found myself covertly snapping photos of strangers’ pets on the street.

Once, during a cocktail party, I told a fellow guest that I’d prefer to give birth to a puppy. No one wants to hear that confession. People instead want to hear that you love the smell of babies. But that wasn’t our life… not yet, anyway.

A dog, however, was a no-brainer. We already had a cat we called Kitty Fat Pants: a portly feline who showed up on a neighbour’s doorstep while they were making a meatloaf. For me, having animals was natural; I grew up in a houseful of them. We had cats, dogs, birds, a ferret and even a miniature pig named Mabel.

Nate and I met our dog in Louisiana, a 4-year-old-ish black rescue Lab-shepherd mix we named Delta Burke. It was an homage to the raven-haired diva from Designing Women, one of my favourite sitcoms as a child.

Our Delta’s coat was the same glossy black and she was born in the South but had little else in common with the star.

Instead of Suzanne Sugarbaker sass, our Delta whimpered and cried constantly for her first few months at our house, allowing us little sleep coupled with an excruciating amount of worry.

She was a trepidatious eater, afraid to walk through doorways and did not want to be cuddled.

I’ve heard many mothers murmur the mantra that the days are long but the years are short, and it rang true to me. I wasn’t a........

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