So, my Memorial Day weekend was better than most people’s. Just sayin’.
If you know me (and if you don’t, please continue reading my blog, I’m sure it’s amusing in its own weird way), you know that I am the exact kind of person who has had wedding fantasies for as long as I can remember. To be fair, I have always been one to think about the future in my idle daydreams. What will I be like a few years from now? Ten years? Twenty? Will I still be this cool if I live to be considered “old”?
My musings about the future have always changed as my own tastes and values have changed over the years. But the wedding whimsies always featured one prominent thing: The Dress! There is a reason Say Yes to the Dress is a popular show. A wedding dress is a piece of clothing that is designed to be the center of attention. In modern wedding culture, the dress is seen as the one quintessential expression of the bride herself. The entire rest of the wedding is done with careful consideration for the groom, the family, and the guests. Depending on the wedding, others may have a say in the dress, but the bride is the one who wears it. It’s the dress of a lifetime.
As you can guess from my intro, I was engaged for approximately two hours before I was thinking about wedding dress shopping. It would have been shorter, but I was kind of in Italy, so there were some distractions. Like being in the most beautiful city I have seen to date. However, I did realize that the timing of this proposal meant that I could share one of my favorite parts of the wedding planning process with someone very special: my mom!
My mom had already planned to visit over memorial weekend, so it was only too perfect to make appointments at bridal salons to go wedding dress shopping. Whenever I pictured myself finding the perfect dress, my mom was always there, so I could only find my dress with her present.
In addition to the wedding dress shopping, we went to a botanical garden and got to watch an outdoor concert by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. These are things that I like, but I know my mom especially loves. And that’s something I wanted to highlight about my mom. I may be the princess in search of her perfect dress, but my mom, she’s the queen.
I know that a lot of people have difficult relationships with their mothers, but I am blessed to be close to my mom. She has always done so much for me, and continues to do so. She never asks for anything, and doesn't want to invade my space. But for the woman who raised me, I will shove things aside and dust off a seat next to me. In those bridal salons, when the curtain was pulled back and my bridesmaids saw me in dress after dress, it was not their faces I watched most closely; it was my mother’s. My bridesmaids may squeal and babble, but it was the quiet voice of my mother I wanted to hear most of all.
I found my dress that weekend. I found it with my mother looking on and smiling as her youngest girl got to live the dream of many dress-up sessions. Mom saw me wrap up in a lace curtain and put scraps of tuule in my hair. She saw me arrange bouquets of flowers from the garden and pretend to marry some invisible suitor bearing the name of a fairy tale prince. She heard the shrieks of excitement as my friends and I described our dream dresses, growing more extravagant with every sentence. My mother knew her little girl princess, and she still knows the woman that little girl grew into.
I am so happy I got to spend time with my mother that weekend. I loved doing things that I knew would make her happy. My mom has spent so much of her life making other people happy, I feel it’s the least I can do to give her what makes her happy. We have the same love language, so it seems simple: Quality Time. But simple doesn’t translate to easy. Distance, work, and a global pandemic have all restricted how much of that ever-spending currency I can spend with my mother. But this weekend will live in my memory forever. My mother was there when I found my wedding dress. As I always wished. The princess got the nod from the queen.
I got the guy, I got the dress, and as of a couple days ago, I got the ring. Those are the important bits, so no matter what else happens, I’ll end up a happy woman.
