The Story of the Dress, Part 2

Kim and I were on a research trip at The Grand Canyon when Kayla called to say she was ready to go wedding dress shopping…and she wanted me to be there. You can’t know what that meant to me. You see, I missed dress shopping with my daughter. We just couldn’t find a time that fit her work schedule, my work schedule, and the dressmaker’s schedule. Instead, her future mother-in-law was with her that day, which is great, it just stung that I couldn’t be there.

So when Kayla asked me to be part of her dress shopping, I immediately got weepy. What a precious gift to be included.

Of course, this was in early March before COVID-19 shut down everything. Kim and I already had plans to go to Michigan and New York for book tour things. We were going to leave a couple days early, stay with Kayla for some shopping, and then do our author stuff. It all got cancelled. Sad, sad day!

See Kim’s post here for the account of how they ended up with an online shopping experience. What I appreciated was still being a part of dress shopping through Zoom.

One Friday, Kayla sent this picture along with a text message: Hm, I wonder what’s in this box. It was quickly followed by: Can we push off crit group today? I’m too excited to wait. I can’t speak for Kim, but I was too excited to wait as well.

I wish we all could have been in the same room, but doing it over Zoom wasn’t bad. Kayla’s friend was amazing. She helped Kayla into dresses, ran into the bedroom for jewelry, fluffed trains, and took pictures almost simultaneously. And after we’d oooh’ed and aaah’ed over all four dress choices, it was Brittany who said, “I think we need to look at one and two again because, you know, with that first one we were all caught up in seeing Kayla in a dress. Any dress.”

True.

So we looked at options 1 and 2 again and decided that #2 was the favorite for everyone.

I got weepy-eyed again. In part, it was the whole experience. But mostly…I think it was seeing the woman Kayla had become and imagining the look on my son’s face when he saw her in that beautiful dress.

The reality didn’t disappoint.