The First Date Nobody’s Talking About

The first night out post-babies

It’s early October 2021. Our twins are three months old, and my husband and I are going out for the first time since they were born. We go to dinner at a fancy restaurant (the kind that provides hot, lemon-scented hand towels to freshen up after your meal) and call it a combined celebration of my 28th birthday and our third wedding anniversary. In truth, it’s a celebration of much more than that. We are new parents to beautiful baby girls…and we are free of them for the evening for the first time in months. At that time, nothing felt more wild than skipping one of the never ending feedings.

The prospect of this dinner was thrilling, invigorating, to me. But that morning, doubt crept in. I felt anxious and prematurely depressed. I remember being on the quiet side in the car. I remember striving to keep it together as we were seated, as we ordered drinks. Before my glass of wine had arrived at the table, I had excused myself to the bathroom where I locked myself in a stall and fanned at my watering eyes. Told myself to breathe. To get it together and not ruin this special night.

At only three months postpartum, I was still hormonal and emotionally fragile. It was also still nerve-wracking to leave the girls when they were so little. But my fears that evening were more…