A Jedi, Strawberry Shortcake, and The Devil walk down Michigan Ave…
I think I’ve been dreaming about my mom a lot lately.
Think because I can’t quite remember my dreams, but I feel like she (whether that is her ghostly visage impacting my dreams or just my subconscious mixing with memory of her) has just exited the room as soon as I open my eyes. Like she is a fog on my morning. Not a bad fog; more like that fog on a morning lake. It’s great to look at, but you wouldn’t want to spend your day in it.
Now… I can think of a couple reasons why my mother lingers longer than the high of my morning coffee.
The first is we’re in the midst my family’s birthday season. Through a teeny bit of disturbing research, I’ve come to the conclusion that my parents loved to make children in July. So starting on March 22nd and running through May 17th, we have at least one birthday every two weeks. (My stepmother and Ryan have since added birthdays to this madness.) It’s a stressful time for me. Not because I shower everyone with gifts, but because I have so much trepidation over my own birthday, which happens to be the penultimate. The first year after my mother died, only one-third of my family called me. So I’ve taken upon myself to make sure that no one has that story; I call, send passive-aggressive text reminders, and then check with the birthday person to make sure they have heard from all the correct parties. If they’ve not, cue the next series of calls and texts to the missing person.
I might be a bit of a control freak.
The second reason might be that I keep getting emails from a dress shop where I tried on a dress, and liked it.
Claire Pettibone’s Queen Anne’s Lace
Ignore the fact you can see my bra and that the dress isn’t the best fit. It was a comfy dress. And I do really like the designer. However, this isn’t THE DRESS.
To be brief, I really like the dress in this picture. It didn’t look horrible on me, but I knew when shortly after I walked in that I wasn’t going to get that dress… (And only a little bit of the reason was the price tag.) It was when I showed a picture of The Dress to the wonderful saleswoman at the bridal salon, and she said they had a dress just like it or rather similar to it. She pulled the dress similar to The Dress, and it wasn’t at all similar. But in the heat of the moment, I nodded and said I would try it on, at least to get an idea of what The Dress would look like.
It was bad. It was princessy and it clung to my hips like a bad layer of fat spandex.
So back to the Claire Pettibone. It’s a simple cotton dress with a lot of handmade lace on the shoulders and at the bottom. It would suit our wedding, and our venue perfectly. And the decor would go along with it. And everything would match delightfully well. I would blend in. I would be lost in pictures, in the small crowd of our family. This dress suits that very large part of me that wishes to be invisible far more often than is healthy. It suits my personality.
That is why I’m not going with it. Because on a day where I’m supposed to be front and center I better damn well make sure I’m there.
But back to my mother and her foggy existence. She would love the Claire Pettibone dress. I can imagine her fawning over it. Telling me how she made her own wedding dress, and used lace with the word Peace to hold the hem on her skirt. The hat she wore, and how her shoes were just the slightest bit uncomfortable. The story finished with how she made my cousin’s flower girl dress from the scraps of material leftover. And how she had planned on making our dresses, or at least shopping with us until we found a dress she approved of and we loved.
Do you have any idea how many episodes of Say Yes to the Dress hinge on agreement between mother and daughter?!? And for a girl who (for some sick reason) uses mass media as a surrogate mother at times, I felt like I was going to this whole dress thing unarmed and incapable of making an informed decision because my mother wasn’t there. And on the best days, I’m not really close enough to any emotion other than meh to open up about how I feel putting on a dress. But I believed I’d still have a moment when I put on The Dress. (Spoiler alert: I did.) Claire’s dress was pretty, but there was no moment. It wasn’t the dress I want Ryan to think of when he thinks of our wedding day twenty-three years from now.
But my mother (either real or imagined) loved it.