Autism Vox

The Dating Game: Who’s babysitting?

by Kristina Chew, PhD on February 16th, 2008

“Reinvent date night” proclaims the New York Times (on February 14th, “heart day” no less): Doing something different, exciting and new is, for long-married couples, the “simple prescription for rekindling the romantic love that brought [you] together in the first place.”

Don’t know about you, but “going out,” on a “date” or not is a fairly novel occurrence for us, due to a few reasons.

First is the perennial Finding a Babysitter problem. Over the years, we’ve had two great babysitters who we called frequently in order to attend school meetings or even (more rarely) to go out for dinner. One was a high school student who went to college in Maryland a few years ago. The other is now a speech therapist; while she is able to babysit occasionally, her time is much more limited. In the next month I have to be at work around 4pm for some student events (of course, they are afternoons when Jim is teaching) and one of my students is going to babysit some days, but can’t all the days, so I’m looking for another student.

Finding babysitters is one thing that has gotten more difficult for us over the years. It was simply easier to find a sitter when Charlie was younger and, well, smaller, and while I don’t think any “challenging behaviors” might occur, you never know. Certainly Charlie is very used to being with individuals who have a lot of knowledge of autism; why the more you talk to him, the more he can get agitated; what to do if he does get really upset. As he’ll be in an unfamiliar environment—-a college campus on very urban Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City—there will be a lot of newness to absorb. I’ll figure something out; certainly I’ve been very grateful for this past week with my parents visiting.

The second reason that Jim and I often have not done the date thing is because, we have too much fun when we go places to Charlie, as when we took him to a Christmas party in Brooklyn, rode several subways with Charlie running and holding Jim’s hand, and got him dinner at Whole Foods in the East Village. Charlie loves to go places and to be on the move (and to end up in his own bed at the end of it) and seeing his face lively and lit up in the glow of city street lights as we walk down Broadway to Penn Station is a treat in itself.

A third reason, which is probably as unromantic as they come is: After a week of working full-time, driving back and forth and forth and back on the interstate and running to catch trains, and school, and whatever adventures in grocery stores or the library or parking lots we manage to get ourselves into and extricate ourselves from, we’re tired. Hanging around home seems not only the best, but the only thing, to do.

Anyways, as this started off as a post-Valentine’s Day post about how to “reinvent date night,” I will note that, yes, I did go into New York after work to meet Jim for sushi (on a restaurant we had never been too on 9th Avenue) and dessert (at a just-opened place). We passed the Alvin Ailey building and saw rows of dancers doing pliés, arms curved and I remembering doing ballet when I was in the third grade. We walked around the Village and promptly ran into one of Jim’s colleagues in front of the red-lettered signs of Village Cigars. I guess that adds up to a few sort of new things—here’s another one: At no point in the evening did we look at each other and say, “What’s going on with Charlie right now?”

Though guess who was kneeling on the carpet and staring in the direction of the door when we walked in.

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POSTED IN: Family, Holidays, Romance