Date night!!!???!!!???

My recent blog posts probably make it pretty obvious, or maybe they don't, that I've been feeling a little morose lately. It happens every year around this time, during winter, but not during December—when I feel the imminence or excitement of time off between semesters—and not during January—when I feel the excitement of a new semester starting. It starts happening in February. I just get moody. I know that I have an amazing life:  amazing baby, amazing husband, adequate dog. But sometimes I just get moody. But it's not only me; it's the world. Today my Yahoo homepage featured a news story headline that read, "Twins, 73, found dead together." Yesterday it featured a headline about a woman who had lost her legs during a successful effort to protect her children from a tornado. And on Monday Yahoo had a story about a grandmother whose entire family, and most recently her toddler granddaughter, died in last weekend's tornados. With tornados falling onto towns, dismembering mothers and vanishing entire families, and with old twins dying simultaneously and in the same spot, it's hard to maintain emotional equanimity.

My winter anxiety is heightened this year, despite season's unusual warmth, because I have a baby. I bet most mothers are as worried about their babies' welfare as Woody Allen is about his own, only it's not nearly as funny when it's for real. The world is a death trap, a disease trap, and an injury trap. Mothers know that not even blankets are benign. What other group of humans has cause to fear blankies? Many deodorants contain aluminum, a known carcinogen, so I've stopped wearing any (and have started stinking it up), because Graham often falls asleep next to me, under my arm, and I don't want him to get cancer of the cranium. Or any other kind of cancer. I can no longer regard the sun as benevolent, because its rays are cancerous.

I need desperately to get over this anxiety in as few as two days, because Aron and I planning a date night during spring break. An overnight date. All night. Spending the night together in a hotel in Atlanta. Without Graham. "Without Graham" is the saddest word duo I have ever seen. What am I thinking when I want a date night that won't include Graham? I'll try to explain.

Aron and I used to live a life totally different than the life we live now, obviously. And of course my life has never been better than it is now that I'm a mother. Graham is an endlessly interesting, fun, rewarding, amusing, adorable, emotionally enriching life project. But I do sometimes miss the other kind of fun Aron and I used to routinely have. On our first date we went to La Fonda and split a pitcher of mojitos before going to listen to Angela Davis lecture at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and after that we went to Manuel's Tavern, where we ate mac n' cheese and drank Jagerbombs. We went to the Decatur Book Festival two years ago and spent an hour chatting at Java Monkey, our favorite coffee shop. For my birthday three years ago we spent the afternoon at Brick Store Pub and ate Flying Biscuit the next morning before we walked up Stone Mountain. We've gone surfing in the Pacific Ocean. We used to go kayaking once a month. We used to play tennis five times a week. We've had sex in a car, on the beach, and in one of those sheds for sale. We used to watch Jeopardy every weekday, but then we cancelled our cable.

Old Times isn't only my favorite Harold Pinter play; it's also my name for this silly tendency I have to glamorize the past. When I look back on watching Cash Cab and regard that experience as the height of my romantic life with Aron, I'm old times-ing things. What I do with these memories is what has been done to Ruby Falls. Aron and I vacationed in Chattanooga when I was five months pregnant, because I was bored and restless and temporarily under the impression that maybe it wasn't really such a lame city. Anyway, Ruby Falls is a geological marvel, an underground waterfall. But they act like Ruby Fall isn't marvelous enough, because the tour of it is turned into this ridiculous spectacle replete with space-exploration-movie music and a crazy, multi-color, light show that flashes, strobes and disorients.

So maybe it's that I want to stop spectacularizing my old life with Aron like Ruby Falls is spectacularized. Or maybe I just want to relive the spectacle.

Thursday, for the first time in more than four months, I felt bored. Graham was napping, and suddenly I realized that I just wanted to go somewhere. Going somewhere isn't as easy as it sounds, because I have pretty intense public place anxiety, and I tend to transpose my anxiety onto Graham, so when Graham and I go into the world together, I'm all the time worried that he's freaked out or not having fun, even though he always seems content to be out and even interested in all the things he sees. So as Graham napped on Thursday, I Googled "things to do with your baby," and one of the search results was an article that had the two lamest boredom-relieving suggestions I've ever hear:  1. walk down the fabric aisle of a crafts store, and 2. pull out and listen to all your favorite CDs from college to remind yourself of your youth. This is so unhelpful:  what the fuck is so fascinating about walking past fabric, and all my favorite CDs from college are all my current favorite CDs.

Lately I have an insurmountable inability to be dishonest, even when being honest interferes with the way I'd like people to think of me. I'd like to be regarded as a selfless, competent mother whose only interest is becoming a better mother. I do think I'm pretty competent, but mothering Graham is too fun for me to pretend it's selfless, and mothering isn't my exclusive interest (and the others don't include knitting, and some of my interests have almost nothing to do with being a mother:  I want, for example, to be a novelist, I really do). So when I admit to being a bored mother I know it sounds so awful. It even disappoints me. Graham isn't boring, and yet, for an evening, I was bored. And leaving Graham overnight to indulge in some irresponsible adult fun makes me sound selfish. What could I possibly want to do that necessarily precludes Graham's presence? Well, quite a few things, actually. I want to:

• see some raunchy stand-up comedy,
• eat a meal with both hands and before it gets cold,
• booze it up,
• make out with my husband,
• tote a purse instead of a diaper bag, and
• not panic on the inside every time I see a smoker or smell a cigarette.

But I'm so scared to leave Graham. I'm never away from him for more than an hour and a half, and even in those short periods I miss him so terribly. Sometimes I miss him so terribly that being stopped by a redlight on my home from class can feel like an agonizing eternity. On the other hand, sometimes I'd rather read a book after class than rush home. Life isn't simple. And I worry. I wake up at least a dozen times each night to make sure Graham is still breathing. What am I going to do when I wake up in a hotel on date night and Graham isn't sleeping right next to me? I'm going to have to trust that he's ok. He'll be with Aron's mom, grandma and aunt, so I have no reason to doubt that he'll be loved, cuddled, changed, and fed. But what if he misses me? I hope that I'm just flattering myself by thinking that he'll care that I'm not around, but based on the smiles he sprouts every time he sees me, I think it's reasonable to worry that he'll feel at least out of sorts when we're apart. Right now he's an hour into his morning nap. He's sleeping in his pack n' play five feet from where I'm sitting, but, because he's sleeping instead of eating or smiling at and talking to me, I miss him.

But we're doing it. Aron and I are going to date each other like it's 2010. And I'm not going to call to check on Graham constantly, because I don't have any Xanax, I do have lots of anxiety, and if I heard him cry from an hour away, I'd just die. So instead of dying, I'm going to have fun. I'm going to booze it up and have a blast. I'm going to have fun.