Posted on 24/02/2023 in Dorothy Says

Be More FuFu

5-minute read

Hello you.

My dog Fufu is small. And MIGHTY. And hilarious. 

Jollof, Fufu’s physically bigger sister (they’re from the same litter), only really barks at people in the street who get too near to us, and bigger animals in the garden and the sounds of people sitting in their back gardens enjoying themselves (she thinks they’re coming for us). 

If Jollof wants to go out to the toilet, she’ll just stand next to the back door and stare at us until we open up. If she wants food she’ll paw at her food bowl until I fill it, and when she wants cuddles she’ll climb up beside me and paw-paw at my hand until I give her what she wants. 

Fufu, on the other hand . . . she will come and bark at me until I feed her. She will sit in my husband’s eyeline and bark until he takes her for a walk. She’ll stand at the back door barking until you let her out. She’ll come and bark at me until I relocate to the sofa so she can sit on my lap. She’ll dip her head down, raise her bottom in the air, wag her tail and bark until I play fetch with her. And when another creature comes into the garden . . . Fufu will bark so furiously her whole body raises off the ground. 

The thing is with Fufu, it doesn’t matter if it’s one of the family of mahoosive foxes that has claimed our garden or the tiniest Blue Tit, she will bark her head off at it to go away. She will bark and bark and bark, come over to me to tell me that this thing is in our garden, then run back to bark at it some more. 

She keeps the same energy for something big as something small. I admire my little girl for that. She doesn’t allow anything to ‘get away’ with blithely wandering into her yard. 

I’m not sure it’s the best way to be – I’ve seen enough variations on ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ to know that sometimes you’re supposed to let insignificant things go. But isn’t it standing up against the smallest slights the way to get the courage to enter into the bigger fights?

Isn’t not allowing people to take liberties on a small level the way you realise that you can’t let things slide on a bigger scale? There are so many incidents from my working and personal life that have involved some sort of disrespect and sidelining that eventually require me to unleash the Dorothy people rarely see. 

After the dust settles and I look back at where this incident really began, I can almost always pinpoint it to somewhere in my shared history with that person where they did/said something that I just brushed off rather than confronting them. 

Like the time someone – let’s call them Z – trash-talked me to the CEO of a company expecting him to stamp on me because I’d asked Z to not do something detrimental to my career. Z was slagging me off not knowing that I had many, many, many receipts of their bad behaviour so when I showed a few of them to the CEO, he quickly made what I requested happen, and only just stopped short of apologising (probably because he didn’t want to admit liability in writing). 

When I looked back, the inciting incident was when Z was rude to and dismissive of me in front of others and I simply brushed it off. I mean, I stewed over it, but I didn’t confront Z at the time because, I rationalised, it was a minor incident – a baby Blue Tit in what turned out to be the gargantuan fox of their bad behaviour. 

Had I been Fufu, I would barked my head off that little incident and we probably wouldn’t have ended up with the bigger incident. Had I been Fufu, I would have totally sweated that small stuff.

As I get older, I’m getting more and more like Fufu. I’m speaking up straight away at the time of the incident rather than letting it snowball. The results are varied but mostly good and effective in the short term, and are likely to be even better in the long term. But either way, I don’t think I could go back to the way of letting the Blue Tit land in my garden without comment now if I tried. And I think that’s OK. 

Are you a Fufu when it comes to the little things? Or do you let things slide? Which way works for you?

Speak to you soon. I hope you are well. 

Dorothy x

(Please excuse typos, I’m only human.)

PS Don’t forget: you can pre-order a signed copy of My Other Husband here and unsigned copies here and here to make sure it arrives in your life as soon as possible after it’s released.