Sister Moments: Another Wedding, Another Dress

My Dear Reader,

My sister, HermanaMayor, just got married. So out of the three of us girls, I'm the only single one left. If you are well-acquainted with Mormondom, you know that I now have a large target painted on my back. Do not worry, Gentle Reader. Any self-respecting Mormon girl who has had the audacity to graduate college without acquiring a husband knows several ways to dodge the when-are-you-getting-married question. Here's one example:

Relation: So, you're what, twenty-four? When are you getting married? Are you even dating someone?

Cecily: Did you hear that China's going to the Moon?

Relation: Wow, I'm thoroughly distracted.

Cecily: Yeah, I thought so. BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!

So, no worries on that front.

You may remember that when PetiteSoeur got married, I wasn't too excited about the bridesmaid dress. This time, HermanaMayor made it easy for me: all I had to do was go to a website and buy this dress. Easy, right? I was pretty happy about it until it came in the mail. That was when I realized that instead of a dress, it was more like a stylish robe. It was a wrap dress, meaning that it had no way of fastening in the front. I tried it on the first time, and I thought, who designs a dress like that? Don't they know that a dress's main purpose is to cover the skin in between my shoulders and my knees? I don't care how pretty it is, if it can't clothe you, it has failed. FAIL!

But the dress was already bought, so what could I do? It did look pretty good on me, after all, and it's not like I could tell the bride that she should pick another dress after all the other bridesmaids have already bought it. (I tried, it didn't work. And I felt like a really big jerk.) So, after coming to terms to the fact that I was stuck with a failure of a dress, I put it away, and forgot about it for three months.

Note to future bridesmaids: this is a bad, bad idea. Never forget about a dress that you're required to wear later. Ever.

So, the day of the wedding came up, and everything was going just great, right? I mean, you know, for a wedding. I had just taken a shower and was doing pretty well on time when I got out my dress to iron it and discovered that it wasn't in my closet, where it was supposed to be.

Oops.

I looked three times in my closet, it was nowhere to be found, which was just great. I had bought it so long ago that I couldn't remember for sure if I'd actually put it in my closet in the first place, and add to that the fact that objects tend to sporadically appear in and disappear from my room*, and it seemed impossible to ever find that dress again. It was too bad that I was going to a place for the express purpose of being photographed in it. It seemed that I was going to single-handedly ruin the most important day of HermanaMayor's life. Awesome.

We looked everywhere. Every closet, every nook and cranny, every conceivable hiding spot. Nothing. Eventually, I had to just give up on it and head to the photo shoot. My lovely, gracious PetiteSoeur offered to let me wear her bridesmaid dress, while she assembled something of her own that looked almost similar. Why a screw-up like me ended up with a sister like that, I'll never know.

So I went to the temple to take pictures. In a blizzard, it turned out. Snow was coming down like it was going out of style, in Oregon, of all places.

The reception was the next day, which meant that I had just a little more time to try and find my uniform, and hopefully, not completely ruin everything. Of course looking for a piece of clothing is somewhat difficult when Padre wants you to go the venue to help Madre, and Madre wants you to go home to get out of the way, and Padre calls you while you're on the road to go to the store and buy pitchers. By the time I got back home, I had about ten minutes to look for my dress before I had to start getting ready. Blarg.

I didn't expect to walk in the door and find out that PetiteSouer and Schwager had located my prodigal dress. It turns out it was in the coat closet the whole time, and since it was black, opened at the front, and had a collar, it had fit right in with the other coats. It blended in so well, in fact, that they only found it after searching that closet multiple times. So, I got to wear the dress to the reception, and everything else was happy ever after. Once again, I don't know how I could deserve a sister like PetiteSoeur. Or a brother-in-law like Schwager. Or a sister like HermanaMayor, who was very gracious about the fact that I was single-handedly ruining everything on her special day. I'm a big dork, you know.

So yeah, that's more drama than I ever thought I'd have involving a dress. It's definitely more than I ever thought I had to write about one.

So, Gentle Reader: if you're going to be a bridesmaid, know where your dress is! Trust me, when the business of a wedding is going on, you don't want to be the one who screws everything up. Leave that to one of the little brothers.

Oh, and BTW, wrap dresses work just fine when you have a friend/sister who is willing to help you safety pin the fabric in place. Just so you know.

Regards, best wishes, and sisters,

-Cecily Jane

*One of the many tragedies of living at home is that you have absolutely no control over your own belongings. None. People just come in, shove your stuff around, reorganize it, take it, hide it, add their own junk to it, and there's little you can do about the whole thing. I probably shouldn't care anymore, but I feel like it's one of the few ways of expressing adultness that I have left. It's futile, I know.