Weddings, my brother and my dress...

My brother is getting married on Saturday.

I just want to say how much I love his bride to be.

She is kind and authentic and ever since the first second I met her, I haven't sensed a single moment where she wasn't absolutely, one hundred percent, being herself.  She's smart and she reads more books than I do.  She works hard and she's responsible.  Mostly, she and my brother are disgustingly, eyerollingly, gag me with a spoonly, In Love.

I love weddings.  I cry at weddings even when I barely know the people getting married.  I cry at weddings even when I don't particularly like the people getting married.  I teared up a little bit during Bella and Edward's wedding in the most recent Twilight movie.  (Goodbye, followers.  I didn't need you anyway, if you can't love me for I am.  And who I am is one of THOSE moms who read all four twilight books in the course of like... 4 hours.)  (But, eff you anyway.  I got my undergrad in English Literature.  I've put in my time with Absalom, Absalom! and William Golding's The Spire and Mrs. Dalloway.  If I want to read juvenile, anti-feminist fiction about totally doing it with hot, teenage vampires, I've earned it.)

Anyway.  What?

I love weddings.  I love cookie tables and first dances and crappy rigatoni vegetarian dinners.  I love flowers and music and handwritten vows.  I love the kiss and the champagne and how brides are always pretty, because they're happy.

I've cried over the beauty of brides in glittering ballrooms, in a field full of sunlight and green grass, in a tiny courthouse room in a town in the middle of nowhere.  I've cried at big weddings with towering cakes and chocolate fountains, and I've cried at impromptu weddings wearing a nursing tank top under my dress.

I can't get enough of it; a love that feels like it's ready to be forever.

And so, I'm extra happy for my littlest brother, who is not only ready to make his love forever, but who is doing it with a wonderful person who obviously loves and respects him.

She's even wearing my wedding dress!

I can't tell you how happy this makes me.

Kurt and I first started planning a wedding in 2006, but then I got pregnant, and our plans kind of fizzled out.

So, then, we started planning a wedding in 2009, but then I got pregnant AGAIN.  Instead of throwing in the towel and putting it off for another few years, we decided to just move forward, even though I'd be 37 weeks pregnant by the time the actual wedding date came.  Even though we had a three year old, we were broke and unwilling to go into ANY debt, paying for our wedding.

We made everything ourselves.  We got married on an overlook on Mt. Washington; the city of Pittsburgh sprawling beneath us.  We hung tissue paper flowers and vellum mobiles that I worked my swollen, pregnant ass off to finish.

The most magical thing, by far, for me, was the blessing of my dress.

I didn't have a dress until a few weeks before the wedding.  I decided to just wear a white sun dress, which, as time and my pregnancy went on, was becoming less and less flattering.  I tried it on, one day, just to get an idea of what I was working with, and I just BAWLED in front of the mirror.  It was awful.  All hiked up in the front and unflattering, I hated that I was going to be a bride feeling so round and ungainly and unattractive.  Hated it.

That's when my friend Avy messaged me from Philadelphia.  She had gotten married the summer before, and she asked me if I wanted her dress.  Her beautiful, sparkly dress with a train and little white glittery beads embroidered all over it.  She sent it to me and I tore into the box like a mad woman.  I scooped it up in a big ball of crinoline and ribbons and tried it on in the middle of Scouty's bedroom.

I totally BAWLED again, but this time because I felt so beautiful.

What Avy did for me, by sending me her dress, was a more amazing thing that I can even convey.

I'm so happy that this dress is getting passed on, again.  It's going to make another beautiful bride.  It's going to carry on a little bit of the love from our wedding day, from my friends' wedding day, and you better believe that it's going to make me bawl, again.

 

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