Photo by: iStock

Spending Date Night Lamenting Your Youth

Photo by: iStock

I’m in a flurry. I’ve put on Madeline for my three year old while I sit at my vanity so that I can apply eye shadow and lipstick. I give myself an asthma attack spraying on drugstore perfume that I’ve purchased because it claims to be French. I’ve just returned from a mad dash to Walgreens in which I’ve also picked up some sort of “blurring” cream that is supposed to erase 20 years of hard living and make me ready for photos (the paparazzi forever plagues me) because oh my god, I have a date tonight!

My three year old has a party to go to tonight. It is from 6 to 8 pm, and it involves singing, dancing, pizza and cake. We almost never have a sitter and this is an opportunity that has fallen from the sky like a platinum-encrusted spaceship that will deliver our child to toddler paradise and my husband and me to a table for two.

It’s Friday night at 6:01. My husband and I emerge onto the avenue and… well… we haven’t really thought this through.

I want to go to an old-time New York diner. It’s homey and it makes me think of 1980s movies and the food is good and reasonably priced and they even have wine. My husband looks murderous when I suggest it.

He wants to go on a date. He wants to go to a dimly lit bar where you hear the murmur of people trying to get into each other’s pants and you feel very young and not at all like tired parents there. Besides, he says, the diner’s clientele is all old people leaving lipstick marks on the napkins and yelling about Israel. I couldn’t choose a less romantic spot if I had tried, he protests.

So we do what we always do when a rare opportunity for time alone presents itself. We wander and argue like an old couple about how to spend our time like a young couple. I accuse him of thinking I am a boring old hen for choosing the cozy diner; he tells me that on the contrary, he thinks I look far too pretty and smell too nice not to be wined and dined at a fancy restaurant. I tell him I am an old hen and my hearing hasn’t been good since they took my adenoids out when I was three so the background noise at a bar would prevent me from hearing him try to get into my pants, anyway.

He asks me to walk two more blocks. Maybe we will spot just the right place. I tell him I am the oldest young person he will ever meet and he knew that when he married me. He tells me I am selling myself short. I tell him I am not, that in fact, I think highly of myself and besides I get a kick out of the old people with lipstick on their teeth arguing about Israel.

It is now 6:30. We have perused a few menus along Columbus Avenue. Wow, we forgot how expensive a Friday night in Manhattan can be. We get nostalgic about a time in our lives when we could wander for an hour until we found the right place. Now the clock is ticking. We are hungry and cold. No one is going to win tonight. If we go to the diner, my husband will be annoyed. If we persist in our quest for a romantic, candle-filled bar, it could be pick-up time before we have a chance to order our food.

Two hours. Two hours. It seemed like so much time.

My husband says, “Let’s go to the diner this week and next time we will find a romantic place where you don’t fit in and you can’t hear anything and the candles are covered with paper bags and the appetizers cost so much that we have to split an entrée."

“Will you secretly resent me for ending up at a diner tonight?” I ask.

“No," my husband assures me. “Not secretly.”

We go to the diner. The bartender is out tonight and the man standing in for him doesn’t know how to make a Sea Breeze. My husband looks up the ingredients: vodka, cranberry juice and grapefruit juice.

The man says, “Sorry, I can’t make that.”

Man, I really screwed up date night. Blur cream, fake French perfume, little black dress and here we are at a diner. “I’m sorry,” I mouth to my husband.

He asks the substitute bartender to mix orange juice and vodka. I glug half a glass. It’s been a while. The walls begin to swirl in a nice way.

It’s 7:30. We wander out onto the street and my husband puts his leather jacket over my shoulders because I am cold and I fall down on the sidewalk, my knees weakened by laughter because he said something funny and I am drunk. I am wearing his leather jacket, I am wearing snazzy boots and hairspray and I am drunk and laughing inappropriately and falling into my husband’s arms on the sidewalk.

We’re back!

It’s been so long. And just like that, we’re back. I knew we were in there somewhere. Now we never sleep and I am always promising roast vegetables and vacuumed floors and household perfection but we usually end up with pizza from the local shop with a side of peas (for guilt maintenance) and more often than not those crumbs on the floor go one more day because getting a vacuum cleaner out of a Manhattan closet is like wrestling a T-Rex and anyway, vacuuming is boring.

It is 7:45. We sit outside with the other parents awaiting their kids. I look forward to the look in her eyes when our daughter sees us. I can’t wait for the leap. The toddler leap is one of complete trust: of course Mommy and Daddy will catch me.

It is 8:00. There she is! Her face is illuminated with the joy of reunion after her prison sentence of pizza and trampoline jumping.

“Why did you leave me there,” she asks. “Why is Mommy so fancy tonight?”

“We didn’t go anywhere fancy, love,” my husband says, “We just ate some mashed potatoes at a diner.”

I knew there was a good reason to pick the diner. We don’t have to tell the kid we do “fancy” things only when she isn’t around. Someday, when she is older, she will be fine with this, but our child is still at the stage where she is mystified by her exclusion from anything we do.

We pile into a cab as she tells us they bobbed for apples at the party. I look at my handsome husband. He is smiling at our daughter.

Next time, we’ll be returning from a romantic corner booth in a dimly lit bar. But I doubt we could have any more fun than we did arguing over every little thing tonight.

Leslie Kendall Dye is an actor living in New York City. She was a nanny for a decade before having a child of her own, who is now nearly three. She writes (of course!) at her blog Hungry Little Animal.

Like This Article

Like Mamapedia

Learn From Moms Like You

Get answers, tips, deals, and amazing advice from other Moms.

For Updates and Special Promotions
Follow Us
Want to become a contributor?
Want to become a contributor?

If you'd like to contribute to the Wisdom of Moms on Mamapedia, please sign up here to learn more: Sign Up

Recent Voices Posts

See all