My husband and I were set up on a blind date in Brooklyn on New Year’s Eve 1997/98. We went to a loud, raucous party with lots of champagne; fireworks (both of the literal and figurative variety) went off as we had our first kiss by a window that overlooked lower Manhattan. We’ve been a couple ever since. Eleven-and-a-half years later I gave birth to our daughter, NG, and we had a first date all over again. It was more subdued than our other first date: it ended way earlier than midnight and I had to be forced to go on it, but all in all, our first post-baby date was pretty nice and, more than that, it was very important.
On our first post-baby date (4½ months after we had NG) we went for dinner at a French café about a mile from our apartment in suburban Los Angeles. A friend I’ve known for nearly 20 years stayed with the baby. We were gone less than two hours: NG slept the whole time.
We eavesdropped on two 50-something divorcees on their first date. We talked about our daughter. It was lovely in a very artificial way: I didn’t want to be there. A date used to be something to look forward to. Now, it was something to cross of my list: something I had to do to let my husband know that I still loved him.
My husband had been gently nudging me towards a date for several months. At six-weeks post-partum he actually tricked me into leaving the house without the baby. It was a confusing and hectic morning that involved friends from the east coast, two babies, an airport drop-off and a sandwich run. My resulting solo trip to the market was the first time I had been more than a room away from NG. I didn’t even realize she was upstairs with my husband until I was pulling out of the garage and looked in the rear-view mirror to see an empty backseat. “Ah,” I thought, “this is why he was so insistent that I do the sandwich run!”
But three months later we still hadn’t been on a date. The nudging became less gentle: there may have been an ultimatum involved.
What I couldn’t articulate then, but understand now, is that there were a number of things working against my desire to be on a date with my husband: NG was coming off a classic 4-month sleep regression that had really kicked my butt; I was nervous about going back to work full-time after several months of reduced hours; I was trying to exclusively breastfeed with a less-than-ample milk supply and a dwindling freezer stash; and I loved being with my baby. Work had already cut into the time I got to spend with her and I didn’t see the need to “waste” anymore precious time.
On some level I must have known that these concerns were temporary but in reality, I’m not quite sure I could grasp that in the moment. And I certainly couldn’t explain it to my husband. With the birth of NG, our lives had changed so suddenly and dramatically that it seemed possible that nothing would ever be the same again. At seven months post-partum I can now say that some things have changed forever (or at least for a very long time) yet some things have already gone back to normal. We’ve fallen into a good rhythm balancing work and parenthood. Sometimes I even go to the grocery store all by myself on the weekends and I feel like my old-self again.
While for me, going out at 4½ months may have been too soon. However, at 6½ months, when my mom came to visit, my husband and I took advantage of the free babysitting and went out twice in less than a week! A month later when my in-laws came to visit we went out again. And I’m already looking forward to celebrating Valentine’s Day with my husband.
But each new mom is different. For a new dad, there probably is no way to know when the right time for the first date is or how much pressure is enough or too much. But know this: the right time will come, whether it’s at two months, four months, six months or longer. The key is to feel it out (so to speak), to ask and encourage until it happens.
I know our first post-baby date would have been strange no matter how long we waited: it’s still hard for me not to feel naked when I leave the house without NG. Still, our first post-baby date was lovely, and even though I was mentally ticking off the minutes of sleep I was missing (which was hardly a concern on that other first-date over a decade prior!), I’m glad my husband made his needs known and I’m glad I was able to rise to the challenge.
Jamie Beth Schindler is a wife, mother and high school administrator.
She is originally from Pittsburgh, PA which, despite her husband's insistence to the contrary, is not in the mid-west. After ten years in New York City she moved to suburban Los Angeles and had a baby!
