Wedding Dressing

The car brimming with relatives, in the height of summer we pulled into Seattle to embrace the four-day celebration that surrounded my youngest daughter’s wedding.

Kate had not been shy about the planning for her big day. Years of imagination and idolization of every Walt Disney princess had caused her to be quite decisive when it came time to select the wedding gown.

“It’s the most important part,” she stated during our budgetary discussion wherein we determined which elements of the dauntingly expensive event might be sacrificed so that her parents be permitted to eat anything other than peanut butter ‘til death did them part.

And so it was that primary purchase occurred during Kate’s visit to New York City. Her older sister Clary who is living there took her under her wing to scan the stores while back in Huson I shivered in trepidation of the impending price tag. How would I keep her down on the farm?

Kate is so like her mother—organized to a fault; it had been merely a matter of days since he’d popped the question and here she was on the Big Apple streets in search of “the dress.”

“We’re at Macy’s,” she cooed when I answered the cell phone call that emanated from Fifth Avenue. Whew; that was a relief to hear considering the tony New York boutiques that specialized in dressing a bride’s mother for bankruptcy.

Three fittings notwithstanding, the final amount was sensible—and “On sale!” Kate chirped with naïve enthusiasm. I had to hand it to her: she knew what she wanted in both man and material. And as a wise composer of sonnets once remarked, “Love does not alter when it alteration finds,” so I reached for my checkbook with each and every nip and tuck of hem and shoulder strap so that my daughter could have her “I do” day in the sun.

Neither was she what one would label the “blushing bride” when it came to wedding photos; I’ve never seen anyone direct the photographers quite like Kate did on those chapel steps, intent on recording for posterity every moment of her happily-ever-after. She has always been my dreamer, while her older sister is the more practical of the pair. Clary has attempted to corral Kate’s untamed imagination from the time her little sister wanted only to be able to walk through her full-length mirror into Wonderland, just like Alice.


In the chapel dressing room before the nuptials, I stood back and watched Clary dress her sister for that moment when she would become a wife. My eldest and I had considered Kate’s new third dimension; in some ways we would need to steady ourselves to accept it. Yet here she was before us, confident, stunning, and utterly unconditionally loved by a young man beyond her most heartfelt childhood imagining.

Clary gathered the bridesmaids to help hold open the dress while she directed her sister to stand on a chair and “jump!” The leap was nothing for Kate, as assured a bride as I had ever seen. She knew and loved Chris along with his parents, siblings, and generations of Pettits and I had witnessed that the feeling was mutual; She was stepping into well-charted familial territory, indeed a safe harbor.

As each small, silk button in a string of dozens closed around the beauty who I still call “baby,” I couldn’t help but finger the fasteners on her Osh Kosh overalls, feel the holes that held them fast on school uniforms and prom dresses, grasp the many I had sewn from a collection in her bottom dresser drawer. I wrestled with the clasps that had secured her neoprene waders the summer just after she’d fallen for Chris hook, line, and sinker, three years ago when I was dressing her for Rock Creek fly-fishing instruction and could see her transformation--that she was in love.

As Clary took the rings to carry for her, I watched their hands—for the moment they touched to say “sister,” without need for words. All the sibling rivalry and slamming doors were distant memories. I thought of my own sister and how we hardly ever have the chance to see each other, separated by several Western states, busy schedules, and the rising cost of transportation. As budding brides, neither of us had purchased a traditional wedding gown—in retrospect, we mused, perhaps a portent of our ill-fated first unions?

While Clary firmly grasped the comb that would anchor the veil to Kate’s hair, I once more tied all those ribbons on ponytails and bobby-pinned the big red bow that matched her Snow White costume. Kate held my mother’s prayer book with her bouquet—the small collection of devotions every woman including and since my great-grandmother had carried on her journey down the aisle. And for a brief moment, just one, single, selfish second, I wanted it all back again—all the trappings of Kate’s childhood. I missed her.

But I did not embrace such longing, for I was overcome with her joy that compelled us both to go forward as intended—to dress my darling girl for marriage and someday, the evolving and myriad raiment of motherhood.

“Do you think she looks ready, Mom?” asked her sister, who turned Kate to face me, beaming and beautiful.

“I do.”