Dogaholics - When Owners Regress

I want to drop the leash that ties me 24/7 to my dog. I am tired. I am afraid I can't do this.

And so last night I did, I left my dog with friends for the evening and then was at least three hours late picking her up.

Now I have perfect excuses for this.
1. I had an important vernissage to attend at YYZ, where I work. I didn't want her at the opening where, as much as people are totally charmed by a pupppy, she is a distraction, for them and for me. (Is it not compulsive how many people smile and start talking baby talk when they meet a dog?)
2. I don't want to leave my puppy alone. Not that I haven't before, but only for shortish periods of time, an hour here or there, three at most. My impression is that dogs that are compulsively submissive, poorly house-trained or unsociable have been left on their own too much.
3. This was an excellent "playdate", Oreo plays exceptionally well with my friends' 1 yr. old Sheltie.
4. I walk Oreo religiously twice a day. I hadn't had time to give her a good dinner-time run, so she needed the exercise as well as the social time.

When I finally arrived in the middle of the night, my friend Patricia was well-prepared (had she been rehearsing for the time her 8 and 5 yr olds will be teens?) reminding me (with a wry smile that let's one know that this is a kind of play, that between adults this conversation should not be necessary) that this was not acceptable behaviour, asking what could possibly have been going through my mind and closing with the question what steps I would be taking to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Being not completely unselfaware, I confessed to "acting out"... somewhere between directing at them rage about various miseries I've been suffering in my life and pleading for help. Perhaps encouraged by my willingness to self-examine, Patricia suggested some cognitive therapy-type exercises. With her usual wit [Good News About the Coming Apocalypse is her blog] she assigned me "homework": to post something about this here. so...

Hello, my name is Rob and I'm a dogaholic.
People joke about this, and most of us laugh, catharctically releasing, as Freud would say, our anxiety about treating an animal as a human, and not just a human but a very priviledged human. Without doubt, I lapsed last night into the kind of immaturity that makes me frown when I see it in the park: dogs leading owners hither and yon, behaving badly and being "reprimanded" in tones that say "You are my little darling."

I regret costing my friends hours of worry and am grateful for their generous good humour but on the puppy front, another price was paid. Having both over-indulged (in beer and play respectively), we squinted at each other for most of the next day, having lost something that previously was understood between us. Oreo pretty much forgot what a leash is, how to walk in the same direction as me or why it might be important to. Two steps back from the one step of good progress we had made this week.

We'll make it up of course, but the questions really are whether I'll get any better at this and how to judge when I am losing myself and coddling my dog instead of providing the right amount of standard care. I could pray for guidance I suppose:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change [e.g. that I have a life that does not in every instance include my dog], the courage to change the things I can [e.g. by accommodating my dog's needs reasonably without laying a trip on my friends], and the wisdom to know the difference [between coddling and providing].

What I do with my dog, how we relate and how she behaves are things I absolutely can control. This is a 24/7 proposition, not unlike alcoholism; once you have a dog, you are never not a dog-owner again. You take it one day at a time. And yeah, I have some personal issues up that I need to, and can, find a way to deal with.