The Distant Memory of Date Nights
If you are like me you go, “Date nights, what are those?”. Date night, let me see if I can define something I am unfamiliar with.
It’s something that spouses do when their kids have someone else to watch them. Something fun that reminds the two what it felt like before kids and the actual fun they had with each other. Sounds right, right?
If you ladies are like my husband and I, we RARELY get date nights. Either we are too scared to let a random person babysit our kids, no matter how much you background check them they still are suspicious in my book, or our family members are busy and you just don’t want to bother them with your little trouble makers. Whatever the excuse is, you put it off and before you know it, a week turns into a month, and a month turns into months. Not good, REALLY not good.
When you have toddlers, your options for fun are limited to: watching them have fun. This is something your spouse does, but doesn’t enjoy spending all his weekend time doing. We can’t blame him, if we are honest it’s like watching paint dry sometimes, except you have to keep an eye on that paint to make sure it behaves or doesn’t kill itself. So date night starts being defined as: let the kids run around and play in the house while ignoring them destroying all of the cleaning you did that day just so you and your spouse can sit down, watch the subtitles on a two hour movie and you may or may not be thinking “I wasted my only two free hours on this, seriously?!”.
When you let date nights go for so long, you start wondering how to have fun with your spouse. You start saying phrases like “Well it’s just another day, guess I better find something for me and the kids to do while daddy gets stuff done around the house this weekend” or “Do we have anything in common besides the kids anymore?”. Let me assure you, YOU DO!
It’s been so long that you don’t remember the joy of holding hands while at a movie or going to a theme park and riding all the roller coasters. The times where you grab dinner and talk for hours to catch up on what’s been going on with the two of you are a distant memory because you never get the chance to at home. The fun of cooking a delicious dinner together that you BOTH sit down and enjoy is now replaced with yelling at your kids to “EAT” the entire time.
Here’s my advice: do something simple that reminds you of the fun you have together. Remember and rekindle how much you love each other when there aren’t kids in the equation. I know it’s hard to do. Trust me I am trying to remember the last date night we scheduled, and I can’t.
As mommas we NEED to schedule date nights. We need to make sure we put off the chores for one day, one night or whenever you can make the time for it. To help find the love in each other again. When you go without something for so long you forget the feeling of being loved and in love with your spouse. We need that feeling to survive parenting and we need that feeling to remind us we are human beings.
– Lao Tzu
Jessica is a stay at home mom to two wonderful boys. Follow her on Medium and you can find more of her writing at her BLOG and more on her INSTAGRAM.
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