For days last week, I walked around with a nagging feeling that I had forgotten something.

Did I forget to send the kids to school after the new term commenced? Why were they, whenever I peeked into the living room, still there?

Nope, it wasn't that: they were having an extra week's holiday because their pre-school's new building was not ready yet (long story).

Did I forget a writing deadline? Frenzied checking of calendar ensued.

Nope, not that either: I'd already planned my articles and academic papers all the way to November.

At the same time, I started having the constant urge to date the Supportive Spouse (SS). I propositioned him to take me out to a jazz club. I had visions of the two of us knocking back whisky and ridiculous cocktails with umbrellas at the bar, as a slinky songstress crooned Ella Fitzgerald classics.

Alas, each time we tried to put on our dancing shoes and sneak out of the house, something or other would crop up. Work snowballed for the SS. The kids refused to go to bed early.

Once, we were determined to take the kids out to dinner, tyre them out at an indoor playground, and then make our getaway after they fell asleep early.

We ended up stuck and hungry in a traffic jam in a shopping mall carpark until 9pm. The playground was closed for maintenance. Our evening's plans were scorched.

For want of an outlet, I started playing American jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux's cover of Dance Me To The End Of Love on repeat at home.

The verse I especially love goes like this: "Dance me to the children who are asking to be born/Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn/Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn/Dance me to the end of love..."

Had I heard the lines earlier, in my discontented 20s, I would have realised that they articulated perfectly why I was unhappy then.

"Make me a mother," they plead subtly. How romantic to sing these lyrics to the man who would become your husband. "I would make life with you; and then I would grow old and die with you," is the irresistible subtext.

Originally by Leonard Cohen, the song was triggered by his reading about how, during the Holocaust, prisoner-musicians were forced to play as their fellow inmates were gassed to death.

Like Romanian poet Paul Celan's celebrated German verses, Death Fugue, Cohen's song is a hypnotic reminder of how passion and horror, life and death can intertwine. And how, amid the depths of the most incomprehensible violence and cruelty, lies a certain beauty and even perverse eros.

Last Friday, after six days of wondering what I had forgotten, I logged onto Facebook. My friend had posted photos of her wedding 10 years ago, along with new snaps of her and her husband celebrating their anniversary.

Suddenly, it clicked. The Supportive Spouse and I got hitched on Sept 10, a date that came and went last Monday.

Neither of us had remembered to mark the day.

I told him, and we laughed.

Yesterday, we finally made it out of the house without the kids - for an hour - on a date of sorts. I was going to the quickie haircut outlet to shave my head (hair-dye allergy disaster, even longer story) and my husband came with me to hold my hand through it. After all, we've pledged for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, with or without hair, right?

The clippers buzzed on my scalp as my short locks fell away, a kind of music in itself.

Sheared, I looked up. He smiled and rubbed my tufted skull admiringly.

As Cohen put it: "Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone..."

We went home, still improvising a life together.

[email protected]

Get my paper for more stories.