Date Night, Recession Style

I’ve been on maternity leave for the past four months with my second child, and if I happen to be lucky enough to have a conversation with an adult, all I want to talk about are the cops, drug dealers and heroin addicts of West Baltimore.  And I have never actually been to West Baltimore. 

With no Presidential election to follow, the news too depressing to watch and nothing else happening in my life outside of breastfeeding, diaper changing and about a thousand loads of laundry, I find myself living vicariously through a bunch of people who don’t technically exist.  When my daughter was an infant, it was Tony, Carmela, Chrissy and Ade.  Now it’s McNulty, Bunk, Omar, and Snoop.  The economy being what it is, my husband and I are not that motivated to drop fifty bucks or more on babysitting, only to spend another fifty on dinner and a movie that’s going to come out on Netflix in a couple months anyway.  Instead (thanks to Netflix) we spend our evenings burning through DVD episodes of the HBO series The Wire.  

The result is that we have become so immersed in the lives of the characters on the show, we discuss them as if they are family:  How is Omar going to unload the package he stole from Prop Joe?  Will Bubbles ever get caught snitching? Who’ll survive the turf war between the Barksdale and Stanfield crews?  Aside from what is needed on our next Costco run, these are the topics that dominate our conversations.  Sometimes I even manage to combine the two, giving our Costco exchanges a Wire-esque spin:  “Yo – don’t get none of them off brand diapers. Those bitches leak. A-ight?”

But now I’m getting nervous.  We are on the fifth and final season – with about enough episodes to last through two or three more weekends, max. 

Then what?

Economy be damned – I suppose we really do need to start shelling out some babysitting money.  Enjoy a dinner without spit up or sippy cups, order a couple glasses of wine and have a conversation about something other than our son’s explosive bowel movements and the take down of drug kingpin Stringer Bell. 

In the meantime, I hear that Weeds is pretty good…

By Shannon Matus-Takaoka