What I Wore to My Wedding

When I was in high school, my best friend’s older sister got engaged and Mom offered to sew her wedding dress. I went along for most of the shopping trips, watching as the bride chose her dress and then found the satin and lace for it. On one trip, Mom had a long list of things to buy. I followed her around Fanny’s Fabrics until I got tired and plopped down on a chair beside the pattern books. While Mom kept shopping, I started randomly flipping through a book.

I wasn’t looking for any patterns, just browsing and keeping an eye on Mom to see how soon we could go. Then I turned a page and found my wedding dress.

Finding My Wedding Dress

I stared at it, studying every inch of the half-page colour picture. The model was tall and dark-haired, like me, casually posed. I pictured the dress on myself as I walked down the aisle to my groom. It was the most gorgeous dress I had ever seen and exactly what I wanted. The only problem was that I didn’t even have a boyfriend. I wouldn’t be getting married for years – maybe ten or twenty. But that was the dress I wanted.

Mom wandered back to say she’d be just a minute longer. “That’s a pretty dress,” she commented, glancing over my shoulder.

My tongue wouldn’t move, but I wanted to say, “It’s the dress I want for my wedding.” She would laugh at me and tell me I was getting a bit ahead of myself. But what if, when I finally met the right guy, I couldn’t find the right dress? What if the pattern was no longer being produced? Mom would be sewing my wedding dress too, and this was the dress I wanted her to sew.

I was still sitting there when she came back again. The pattern book was still open to the same page. She looked at it and asked, “Do you want to get that pattern?”

“Could we?” I begged, my face lighting up. In a minute I had found the drawer and the pattern and pulled out my size. In the van on the way home, I couldn’t stop grinning. Mom laughed with me that I’d found my wedding dress so easily. My best friend’s sister had been to a dozen stores before finally deciding on the dress she wanted.

Over the next few years, Mom used the pattern for a couple other dresses, including my high school grad dress. We found soft, shimmery green fabric at an East Indian store for my grad dress. I felt like a princess on my graduation day, in a dress that fit me like a glove.

What I Wore to My Wedding