It May Be Date Night, But...

To my dearest husband,

I woke up this morning with my sleeping 2-year-old’s finger up my nose, her skull resting squarely on top of mine, and, I’m pretty sure, her hot mouth-breath steaming the lines out of my forehead.

I have spent hours upon hours today with many small children climbing on my body, pulling at my clothes, wiping their fluids on me. They poke me, squeeze me, sneeze on me, rub their faces into me, curl up on me, and wrap their limbs around me so tightly I have nightmares of being squeezed to death by squids when I finally close my eyes at night.

And although I love you too, I’m going to ask that you keep your sexy man hands to yourself for a hot minute. Mama needs some PERSONAL SPACE before I can mentally switch gears from mom to wife.

So please keep the following in mind before you turn up the slow jamz:

It may be date night, but our kids spent a solid three minutes today pinching my stretched-out bellybutton before I felt the baby’s diaper thundering in my bare hand. So… I’m going to need you to hold your horses.

It may be date night, but I haven’t even peed since I woke up this morning. And during that solitary trip to the bathroom, our newly potty trained child followed me in… and offered to wipe me. So… let’s just pause a moment while I try to burn that endearing hypothetical out of my immediate chain of thoughts.

It may be date night, but I’m wearing the same bra I wore yesterday and then fell asleep in last night. And then the baby spit up into my cleavage and it pooled there for awhile until this bra soaked it up and I forgot about it. So… I’m going to need some time to regroup, and maybe to torch the Victoria’s Secret catalogue that’s sitting on the kitchen counter under the spatter of orange macaroni powder.

It may be date night, but our daughter wiped her nose on my arm today, then examined it and told me it was mashed bananas. (It was not.) So… why don’t you just keep your distance until I can scrub both the arm and the memory?

It may be date night, but I just spent 85 percent of the day on my knees. Let me beat you to the punch line of that joke by telling you it was spent scraping dried spaghetti sauce off the floor, rounding up approximately a billion sensory beans, and scrubbing pee-pee out of the carpet. So… as sexy as my hole-in-the-knees mom pants are, I’m going to go ahead and take a breather.

It may be date night, but that crazed look in my eye is the result of repeated exposure to toys that light up, honk, or sing “Let It Go” in Spanish. So… please don’t be offended when you find me huddled in a dark corner rambling incoherently to myself instead of waxing poetic about romance tonight.

It may be date night, but I cooked three meals today with the big kid wrapped around my leg, the little one on my hip sucking my ponytail, and the middle one sprawled on the floor crying to be held. Or danced with. Or guided through “the biggest jump ever.” So for dessert, I think I’ll have an order of silent meditation — make it a double.

It may be date night, but I just (finally) got the baby down, and I have already bartered with God about letting her stay asleep this time. If we wake her, I will likely have to nurse her for another twenty minutes, and to say my ta-tas are experiencing an identity crisis in moments like these is the understatement of the year. So… let’s just be quiet for, I dunno, six more hours.

I love you, you are super hot, and I swear I will make us my priority again soon. But today, our kids were so ON me they might as well have still been INSIDE me, and I desperately need to recharge before I can look into your dreamboat eyes and think of anything but how good it would feel to shut mine and pass out.

So for now, let’s just enjoy some wine and strawberries that haven’t been cut into quarters. Let’s sit by the fire , and try to remember why we fell in love a lifetime ago. Hold me close throughout the night, shielding me from the toddler who tries to jump on my face at 3 a.m.

Thanks for understanding. Happy Date Night!

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