My Mother's Wedding Dress

My mother's wedding dress is stained with sherry from a spill at the wedding breakfast.  The beads, once white, have oxidised and blackened.  The zip is broken and some of the beads from the train are missing, gone to decorate another dress which has long since been donated or cut up or has simply been lost in numerous moves.  But like the marriage, the wedding dress survives.  It is older, no longer pristine, it is stained and altered, it doesn’t do up properly but it is still beautiful.  It was made to last: a carefully constructed garment that rustled with promise.  Its lining was chosen for its durability and strength.  A long marriage has been stitched into its seams.  I wonder if it would pass on its secrets if worn by another bride?

My sister and I used to play with the dress and a missal.  We discovered the ceremonies in the book; the funeral ceremony, the baptism and the wedding vows.  Sometimes we would dress up in the wedding dress and put on the veil and get married to our teddies.  Once we even married our father while our mother was playing the organ at church.  The groom wore pyjamas and a dressing gown and sat on a dining room chair smoking.  First he married my sister, but he began to grow tired of the game when it came to my turn.  Before we could go through with it, he put a stop to the proceedings. 

This turned out to be one of my great disappointments as it was the only time I came close to wearing a real wedding dress at a marriage ceremony.

When my father married my mother at 11am on November 7^th 1964, he wore a black suit. My mother wore the dress which is now 45 years old.