This time of year, my thoughts turn to my mother. They almost always do, especially as we march into March.
When I was small, I learned she'd had a mysterious husband, Richard the First, before our dad. Her real wedding dress, the flowing white one, not the one she designed to marry my dad--one did not wear white to become a remarried divorcee--was tucked away, along with her first wedding album. Her cousin wore the dress, when her time to marry young came. Mom kept the dress boxed away for me. My early 20s turned into 29, and then my thirties. It happened, of course, when the time was right and the man was right. The dress came out, a final command performance, in December of 2001.
After my mother passed, some ten years later, photographs of the past popped into the present, the dress took on a life of its own. I wrote this to my Mother, and to her cousin, and for myself, as a present.
When I was small, I learned she'd had a mysterious husband, Richard the First, before our dad. Her real wedding dress, the flowing white one, not the one she designed to marry my dad--one did not wear white to become a remarried divorcee--was tucked away, along with her first wedding album. Her cousin wore the dress, when her time to marry young came. Mom kept the dress boxed away for me. My early 20s turned into 29, and then my thirties. It happened, of course, when the time was right and the man was right. The dress came out, a final command performance, in December of 2001.
After my mother passed, some ten years later, photographs of the past popped into the present, the dress took on a life of its own. I wrote this to my Mother, and to her cousin, and for myself, as a present.
The Dress....
Three women
Three marriages
Three men
Four lessons
ivory satin
poured like cream
into an Audrey Hepburn dream
Mary Ann
Dorothy Kaye
Deborah Ann
Mary Ann nursed her father
as he lay dying of mysterious
1940s diseases today’s chemical capsules can cure
Her father never saw 1950
She never saw the inside
of a high school classroom her junior year
Her father taught her hard scrabble survival skills
how to get around Kansas City's Grand Downtown
by hook or by crook, cab or street car
Her counselors advised her to take mending and sewing
cooking and stirring and slicing and dicing
because, after all, she would be a wife one day
She met Richard at a wedding
She was 19, about to blossom
She married n the spring of 1952
Marriage was not what she thought
It's not really what most people think
it is much harder to undo a marriage in early1950-something
Accusations, an affair, atrocities?
Oh to be Catholic, her queendom
for want of an annulment
People do things, say things, make mistakes
Things were done, things were said, mistakes were made
Oh, how I long to hear my mother's active, passive voice
A divorcee, a beta model single mother?
Unlucky in love, in love with love
not ready to figure out how to make it all work out, eventually
A brief marriage
A powerful message—
Have something to fall back on.
Shift forward in the past to 1958
Another young woman drawn to a man
The the alluringly powerful lure of romance
How could you? What were you thinking?
We've no money and two others at home
and...why, it's Christmas!
Families seemed unprepared when their offspring
push to marry and practice procreating
to produce for the next generation new and improved relationships past
How do you find a suitable dress
to marry a suitable suitor?
Your glamourous cousin blazed a trail there, too
Modified to fit the smaller town lifestyle
of this Kansas couple, the dress began
a lifetime romance still perking along
Stashed away afterward
the seams ripped out,
stored away for someone else's daughter some other day.
This girl's parents began buying kitchen baubles
fearful she'd never find a future man
“It's no wonder you aren't married...” echoes in the girl's ears
Not waiting for a man to begin her life
Changing careers and apartments
seeking her own opportunity, like her mother taught her
In blows The Dennis, a whirlwind of activity
into the swirling world of the daughter
a solid, stable, mast of a man
Rooted in Iowa cornfield
transplanted to Hollister
refusing to take the Iowa or the boy out of the man
An impetuous decision
quick, decisive, determined,
"My daughter came home with her man in tow"
Standing on the dining room chair
as my mother took scissors to her dress,
the dress connecting her to Richard the First,
to her family in Kansas City,
to her daughter's future
with her hand picked man of mystery
The movement toward standards
hadn't hit anyone but the men
in their brooks Brothers' suits with their Stepford wives.
The sleeves were too tight,
you were always so athletic,
dripping with distaste.
She didn't get that from me
You're bigger than I was
We'll never make it fit you
(and Dorothy Kay was apparently
starving herself to death, since I am not a large woman.)
Four preps, grad school and walking pneumonia saw to that.
Off with the sleeves—to accommodate
the forearms that enabled her to throw
a ball and swing a club to catch her man
Slicing through the netting and
baby pearl buttons up to the neck.
No choking off this one's spirit in the tight yoke of societal expectations
Scissors to her dress
Severance from her past
severe consequences of choosing incorrectly
Gloves and a cape, to collect
the drops of good luck that
rained down on her daughter's wedding day
one failed marriage not really meant to be,
one traditional marriage, still going strong,
or at least perking along 60 years later
one rather nontraditional bride,
the untraditional daughter of
tradition breaking woman,
who showed her daughter
not to be hasty,
not to rush to judgement,
not to marry the first man who asks,
and to never, ever settle
for less than you deserve.
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