My day is fine until my daughter loses her shit after school. She loses her shit because her underwear is suddenly uncomfortable. I have been expecting this all day long. She tends to lose her shit after school, and underwear is just the worst. She is six. I handle the uncomfortable underwear apocalypse very well, meaning I don’t lose my shit.

My daughter settles down, and I head to Zoom couples counseling upstairs with my husband while our kids watch screens downstairs. In couples counseling, we mostly talk about the uncomfortable underwear incident and the fact that our daughter is seeking attention at the core of it. Yup, that tracks. I feel a bit like a shitty mom, but I know I’m doing my best.

After couples counseling, it is date night. I get to the bar/restaurant before Alex, and have an uncomfortable social interaction with other patrons when I ask if they would mind moving tables so we can use the dart board, which their table is in front of. The husband doesn’t mind, the wife obviously does mind. She doesn’t want to move.

But the husband says OK and starts to move, and while the wife stays put, I can see that I shouldn’t have asked them to move in the first place and I’d created an awkward situation. They end up moving, and the guy from the restaurant comes out and tells me they don’t do darts this early anyway. I feel like an ass, apologize to the couple one last time, and sit at my table two tables away.

My husband arrives, and during our date, we discuss an awkward situation involving our babysitter and the neighbor kids, and I feel weird about my communication surrounding that. I feel like I am stressed out and communicating poorly all around and just can’t win.

We come home from our date, and I want to avoid making a further ass of myself in front of the sitter, so I retreat upstairs. I arrive upstairs and open the door to the guest room, and our very angry cat bursts out. She has been locked in this room for three hours during our date. I smell cat shit.

I apologize to the cat for locking her in the room, she complains vociferously. I look for the cat shit. “Please do not have shat on my Moroccan rug,” I think to myself. I look in the bathroom, where I suspect that she would have shat, and to my great relief, she has shat on a towel that is crumpled on the bathroom’s tile floor.

“Good kitty!” I cry out to her when I find the shit in the towel. (Seriously, cat shit would have ruined that lovely rug.) I sing the cat’s praises as I clean the bulk of the cat shit off the towel and into the toilet. “Good kitty, good kitty,” I say as she circles around me.

Sooooooo, some date nights are just like this.

They are nights that include a child screaming about uncomfortable underwear, a weird lady (me) constructing socially uncomfortable situations surrounding a dartboard, and a cat, who is trapped, shitting on a bathroom towel.