“Just don’t make our daughter wear a dress.”
If these weren’t the first words I said to my ex-husband on hearing the news of his engagement, they were at least the second (I dimly recall offering “congratulations” or some other socially appropriate response but honestly, the true order eludes me).
T. hates dresses. She hates dolls. She hates hairstyles, girl shoes, lipstick: in short, everything that a fancy, formal wedding relies on. And that’s what her father and his fiancée had immediately started to plan.
“She’ll refuse to walk down the aisle if you put her in anything girly.” I added for emphasis: “She might even refuse to come to the wedding.”
“I know, we’ll work something out,” my ex responded. But I didn’t trust that they would.
Thus far I had been very impressed with the relationship my ex’s girlfriend was building with T. She seemed willing to let intimacy develop at T’s pace, rather than forcing affection, and from what little I saw at drop-off and pick-up from my house, she genuinely liked T. and didn’t appear to be merely tolerating her just because she was dating T’s father—all excellent markers that I noted and reported happily back to my friends and family. “I like her,” I told everyone. “I really hope this one sticks.” So my immediate certainty that T. would be forced into a crinoline, hoop skirt, and a wig of blonde ringlets was unfounded, if not downright paranoid.
Yet my fantasy persisted. I came up with imaginary arguments against the moment I was sure would happen any time: the conversation about The Dress; my ex asking me to enlist with them in the effort to persuade T. to wear a costume she would hate. I spent more hours obsessing over the outfit my daughter would wear to her father’s wedding than I did obsessing about the outfits I wore to either of my own.
My current husband and I married three years ago in the middle of a chicken-and-ribs BBQ party on a beach that took place the day after his cousin’s much more formal wedding. T. and my stepdaughter, D., were four years old; T. wore blue shorts and a striped tank top and D. wore a bathing suit decorated like a strawberry, covered up by a hot pink poncho. We just wanted to get the job done. The girls were young enough at the time to gloss over the bigger meaning of this colossal reworking of their entire lives and to focus instead on dumping rose petals in the sand in their guise as joint flower girls. We had it easy.
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