Week 5 Prompts

17. You’ve lost It! Where is It?

Wedding dress.

My mother made my wedding dress. I wouldn’t have mentioned it except for the fact that she did it without my knowledge and without my presence.

At the time we announced our intent to get married my father and her were on their first of four years in Santa-Fe, a small town on the banks of Parana River in the northern part of Argentina. My father was there on an assignment to run the local Jewish school.  We invited them, and my only brother, to join in what was going to be a very small affair in the town were my future husband was from in the U.S.

Unlike many brides to be I had no real interest in the affair itself and even less so in the necessary attire. We both thought that the smaller the event, the better, and wanted it to be as informal as possible. I met Chucks’ parents just briefly on one of their visits to Israel and the idea of a wedding full of strangers was somewhat captivating by being bizarre and in a way humorous, yet I wanted to keep it small. The thought of a wedding dress did not even cross my mind. Few days before leaving Israel, for the planned wedding, I got a long colorful dress that seemed to me more than appropriate.

When we got to his home town in mid December we discovered that his parents were not going to go along with the original plan and were in the midst of compiling guest lists and planning food tasting, flower arraignments, and so on. Realizing how important it was to them we consented to go half way and “granted” our permission to a medium size, rather modest event in the towns’ synagogue.

Soon it became clear that a different dress was needed and my lovely dress bought in one of the stylish boutiques in Jerusalem will not do. By then it was less than two weeks before the wedding date. When I told my mother over the phone about the new development she laughed knowingly and said “I knew you will come to your senses, so don’t worry, I already made you a dress.”

My mother was a seamstress who did not work in her profession but insisted of sawing all my cloths. I hated this. I disliked everything about the process, from choosing the material to the endless process of being fitted while needles are stuck to the material all around me, barely missing me. All I ever wanted, as a child was to walk into a store and emerge few minutes later with a ready dress, or a blouse or pants.

Even though I was not consulted, I felt a great sense of relief for not having to be present for the material choosing, measuring, re measuring and so on. So I just shrugged my shoulders and smiled to myself at this wedding that felt more and more like staging, with me being just one of the performers.

A week before the wedding we greeted my parents at the airport and that night my mother pulled from her suitcase a carefully packed package. When she opened it and hanged it on a cloth hanger, she said as a matter of fact “Oh, it is almost done we just have to do the last measuring…”

My last recollection of the dress is my wedding night, when it definitely was a success, and unlike any dress one can buy ready in the store. I can’t recall seeing it ever again though, after that day. Every now and then I’ll try to remember what happen to it. Did I pack it? Did it travel back with us to Israel?  Was it accidently left in one of the many boxes we left behind us as a trail, on our frequent moves? I guess I’ll never know and if not for the wedding pictures I might even doubted it ever existed.