Growing up on Dr. Seuss, I can’t wait to buy his posthumously published book, What Pet Should I Get?

Yet I’m relieved I never had to read it to my daughter.

My husband and I moved into a building that didn’t allow dogs when I was three months pregnant. Our baby grew into a 3-year-old who couldn’t comprehend why buildings banned adorable members of the American Kennel Club.

“I need a puppy,” she kept reiterating, bursting into tears. She clutched Puppa, the stuffed Golden Retriever she dragged to preschool every day. The lovey she’d tossed into a lake when she was 2. Rescued by diver Dad. Resuscitated in the delicate spin cycle by Mom.

Would our daughter spend years on a therapist’s couch trying to forgive us for a no-Fido childhood? We sublimated, as our building welcomed reptiles to rodents. First with fish, but they did what aquatic vertebrates always do: drowned too young. In Death of a Fish, Adam Gopnik purchased an identical fish to secretly replace his daughter’s deceased one and threw it into the tank. But after we lost a series of swimmers, we stopped replenishing clones at Petco.

I empathized with my daughter’s longing for a critter that wasn’t fraying, sewn together from textiles rather than real shedding hair. I, too, had repeatedly pleaded for a mongrel. My mother had canine phobia. The mutt she reluctantly cared for when my brother was young sensed her fear. “Every time I called him, he growled and inched further away,” she recalled.

I was in seventh grade when she finally relented to let a miniature poodle with a gray snout move into our house. “You’re going to walk it,” Mother warned. When my parents moved out of the suburbs, Pepe was negotiated as part of the sale of our house – much to my horror. “Who wants to walk a dog in the city?” Mother asked. She reassured me that the new owners had a son who’d love Pepe as if he’d raised him from puppyhood. Inconsolable, I was packing for college, sobbing each time I passed Pepe with my duffel bags, knowing I’d never see him again.

“You love him more than me,” Mom complained.

I was too choked up to tell her she was right at that moment. It took years for forgiveness to sink in.

And now real estate issues were again influencing whether I could satisfy my daughter’s request for child’s best friend. On her seventh birthday, her friend gave her a hamster from a brood delivered in her bathtub. She named him Macaroni, after his sibling Cheez.

I was anti-rodent, but she tamed him to like human contact. She potty trained him. “I love you too much, Macko,” she’d say, begging me to kiss him. Sometimes Cheez dropped in.

I hosted Macaroni’s first birthday party. His siblings attended. One peed on my lap. I sent them all home with goodie bags filled with organic lettuce leaves. When a school assignment asked the kids to draw their family tree, my daughter’s rendering was a cute assortment of hamsters, none resembling my Russian-Polish-Austrian heritage.

Macaroni broke his back shy of his third birthday. The vet recommended putting him to sleep.

My daughter made a coffin out of an empty tissue box, drawing one final message: To Macko: I (symbol for heart) U. Macaroni was buried next to Cheez in Cheez’s backyard. My daughter sprinkled his grave with elbow pasta.

“Macko was the only one I could tell my problems to,” my daughter said. “Next time, I want a pet that lives longer.”

Years later, her friend adopted an English Bulldog. She cried about the injustice – and then she became Winston’s godmother. Let him drool on her, then went home to shower. The perks were like being a grandparent: spoil the little critter, leave without having to discipline.

In high school, she became our building’s pet-sitter-for-hire. She fed tankfuls of fish and narcoleptic gerbils, making sure devious cats didn’t turn on ovens while their owners were on vacation. Caretaker of a zoo but still petless.

“I’ll miss you when I go to college, Puppa,” I overheard her say. “You’re too frail for dorm life.”

Puppa will live forever. Disabled and over-the-hill, she’s here. Always will be. Louis C.K. does a routine about the inevitability that dogs will die: “If you buy a puppy, you’re bringing it home to your family saying, hey, look, everyone, we’re all gonna cry soon. ... Countdown to sorrow with a puppy.”

Yet once again I covet that countdown. The more my daughter flies from my orbit, I feel a tug to adopt a rescue animal. When I retire. I’ll downsize – into a “yes dog” building. Real estate robbed me of Pepe when my parents sold our house, and I didn’t have the foresight to envision that my own apartment purchase would prevent my daughter from the loyal creature she yearned for. I imagine her visiting me and my new cuddly companion.

If she confronts me and says, “I’ll never forgive you for not letting me have a dog,” at least I’ll have a wet snout close by to lick away my remorseful tears.

Candy Schulman is a writer whose essays have appeared in many publications. Follow her on twitter @candyschulman.