There has been a wee bit of wedding anxiety of late.
Today’s focus is The Dress. I’m living in fear of the moment the designer contacts me and asks for my measurements. She’s making it for me, so I can’t really order it in a size smaller. In a crazy illogical way, I had convinced myself I had six weeks to lose 30 pounds. I’ve lost about 20 of it, so with the help of a “crazy” diet that wasn’t far off our regular diet… And two workouts a day, I’ve mostly made it.
Two a days. For a girl who suffered with anorexia (still does at times), trying to lose weight by watching what I eat and working out seems hard. Okay… It doesn’t seem hard. It is hard. One workout is part of my Couch-to-5K program, so just a simple interval run for a little over 30 minutes. Or a straight forward 25 minute run like I did today. The other workout is P90X, which is a sort of collective effort by myself, Ryan, and our friend Kellen. Working out with at least one other person to make funny faces at makes it one hundred percent better. I look forward to the time together.
Because who doesn’t want to sweat profusely with friends?
We are three months from the wedding, so the time to gear up and slow down on the workouts might be here. This afternoon, Kellen took me to the seamstress so I could have my measurements updated for The Dress. Tomorrow I’ll email them to the designer and we’ll see what visual weight I’ve lost. And continue to work out because I’m enjoying it.
Friends tell me that they see the difference in the weight I’ve lost. I am continually reminded of a phone conversation I had with my mother soon after I took a job waiting tables at a dive. At the time, I was in a pretty anorexic state. My food intake was limited to half a Clif Bar most days; perhaps with some pop while working, but not much. During the conversation, I mentioned to my mother I had just had a taco and I could see the fat appearing on my rib cage. This was one of the most intimate moments with my mother; she responded with “I don’t know what to tell you, honey. I have the same problem. I see the same things.”
And when I look at my collar bones start to appear, I think of her voice on the phone, repeating those sentences.
There are many things that are difficult when planning a wedding without my mother. But I wish I could hear her approval of The Dress, and how I look in it. Not that the one I tried on at the designer’s fit perfectly, but I still had a moment in it. In my imagined interaction, she smiled and shook her head as I had picked out a dress she would have never even considered. But it’s an April dress, and that’s what she called it. An April dress.
Perhaps there might be too much fantasy to bring Mom into the wedding. But as I often feel the lack of her, and the lack of her on my side, I make up stories. How things might have been different. We don’t always get along. Fantasy Mom was upset at our final guest list. She is also sad about our not being married in Grayling, but she understands.
It’s silly and weird. I get it. It might make you uncomfortable to read this. And for that I apologize. But we don’t talk a lot about the people we lose. Our society expects us to pick up and function no more than two weeks after someone dies. Disney treats parental deaths like they are the most natural thing in the world, and maybe that is part of the issue… We’ve been desensitized until it happens in our house. And we realize that Disney lied. It hurts to find yourself less a mother (or a father, I imagine). And while you pick yourself up and learn what the world is without that person and you are able to catch your breath, it never really goes away.
Right after she died, I found myself dreaming of my mother. I had one dream where she cried and apologized and told me, “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.” It was the closest thing to closure I received. But I had a series of dreams where I found myself in another version of my life. They lasted for months; every time I went to sleep, I found myself in a world where Mom was still alive, getting better after her liver transplant, and still there to talk to me when I called. Mornings were like peeling your legs from a vinyl bench–you were comfortable and content until you tried to move, and then it was just pain. Tearing.
Recently, I’ve found myself dreaming of this place again. Not necessarily of my mother, but feeling like she was just in a room before I entered it. There is no sadness there, just a strong desire to catch her. Catch up with her.
As the wedding nears, I expect this feeling to grow. While I expect my fantasies to subside to this reality.
And while this world doesn’t have her anymore, I am happy here.