Turning Your Wedding Dress Into Something Old and Forever

Kate makes her First Communion on Saturday. And she’s doing it in my dress.

This is kind of a thing in our family. Back when my brothers and I were getting married, my mom used her dress and my grandmother’s dress to make garters for the brides. They were our something old, and especially meaningful for me, since my grandmother passed in a horrible car accident only a few months before I met Shea. She should have been there on my wedding day and the garter made me feel like she was.

When the grandbabies started coming, my mom made a christening gown. Five grandsons later, she got to make a bonnet for Kate.

As soon as she found out Kate was going to wear my Communion dress, she sent me some lace from her dress to trim the veil and satin covered buttons from my grandmother’s dress.

My grandmother, Virginia (1944):

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My mom, Terri (1968):

photo_2 — Ted and Terri, August 17, 1968

Me (1979):

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Kate in her christening gown (2008):

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Kate in my dress with lace trimmed veil:

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My mom says all she has left of the two dresses is scraps. I think it makes her a little sad.

But the wedding dresses are a magical part of our family history. They could have hung in closets for the last 50 years, and for what? My grandma was tall for her generation, but still five inches shorter than my mom, so even though my mom wanted to wear her dress, it was too short.

I am the same height as my mom, but…how shall I say…more bosomous. I didn’t fit in her dress.

They would be hanging there still if my mom hadn’t had the courage to make them into something new, and lasting.

Now I have a garter to pass on to my girls when they marry. Or I will make them new ones from my dress and pass mine on to my granddaughters. Maybe eventually, there will be a collection from which to choose, our version of the Crown Jewels.

The christening gown is embroidered at the bottom with the name of each child who has been baptized in it—all three of mine and one of my nephews. It’s a living record of faith that I hope gets handed down for generations, until there’s no more room for names and a descendent of mine cuts up her wedding dress to make a new one for her grandchild.

In the meantime, Annie swears she will also wear my Communion dress when the time comes. And before anyone goes bridal dress shopping, I’ll pull my dress out of storage, just in case. If not I won’t be afraid to take scissors to that thing and make precious heirlooms for the grandkids that come along.

Just like a wedding is about a marriage and not a day, a wedding dress is about a family and not a bride.

Let’s Talk Turkey

You probably noticed that last week, my town was trending on Facebook—trending #1, in fact.

For the SECOND time this year.

The first time was when a Facebook post by our local police department went viral. I don’t know who writes the crime updates, but they are Freakin’. Hilarious. Right now, they have this whole thing going about wearing other people’s pants (OPP).

You might be amazed to know how many people are walking around wearing OPP, especially if those pants have meth in the pocket.

They went viral after posting the video of a man—who looked a lot like CNN’s Mike Rowe—robbing a bank. They asked for tips. They got a lot of tips, pointing towards Mike Rowe, because it’s not just the cops in my town who are funny, let me tell you:

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Mike Rowe—who is also funny—addressed the controversy in a Facebook post of his own and Boom! The Medford PD was on the map.

Last weekend, our local paper posted an article called “Medford May Look For Ways to Curb Nuisance Wild Turkeys”.

This is front page news. Deservedly. I have personal knowledge of this problem.

We are not talking about wild turkeys on the outskirts of town. We are talking whole flocks smack in the middle of main streets. I have posted pictures of the little buggers on my Insta and Facebook. Just a few weeks back, Annie and I were delayed at an intersection while a great big mama held up traffic until she was gently herded to the sidewalk by a Prius.

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We don’t have traffic in Medford, not the kind that makes people late. Unless there’s a turkey.

IMG_20151008_091555 — Yep. That’s a giant Tom just chilling on someone’s front lawn in the middle of town.

Totally unacceptable.

Our turkey story went viral, because the world understands the plight of a town overrun by turkeys.

(Right? That’s why, right?)

To show you how this all comes full circle, a few days later, the Medford PD posted a crime update where they caught all kinds of bad guys. A list of them, in fact.

And one of the commenters said “Look at that list. Not a turkey among them. When are you guys going to get serious about the turkeys?”

I’m telling you, quality of life is not just about clean air, green trees and good coffee. You also need to live among people who make you laugh.

#lifeisbetterinoregon

The Power of Mothers

Grace

You know we have great moms. You know we aspire to be great like them. On Sunday we will celebrate them in love and thanksgiving.

We will also patiently endure the love offerings of our own chicken nuggets. At the dinner table this week, Kate asked me what I wanted for Mother’s Day. I said “No jewelry. No appliances. Nothing for the kitchen.” And she turned her face to me, sweet forehead all scrunched up and asked “Well, what’s left?”

Did you know that the original idea for Mother’s Day was never meant to be about mothers?

It was supposed to be for mothers, a day when mothers all over the world came together to use their collective voice for peace.

I learned this from Glennon at Momastery.

Julia Ward Howe issued “An Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World” in 1870. It reads:

Arise, then, Christian women of this day ! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears ! Say firmly : We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

— Julia Ward Howe

What happened next was that, because she was a woman and a suffragette and she spoke the family business of her repressive marriage outside the bedroom, she was generally ignored.

Almost 40 years later, on May 10, 1908, Anna Jarvis observed the first Mother’s Day at her church. It was in honor of her mother, and again an effort to put the role and voice of mothers in the forefront of society. Her version was more palatable, and Mother’s Day became an official observance in 1914.

Then Hallmark realized there was money to be made and the rest is ugly history.

I don’t know any mother who says “Yippee! Mother’s Day!” For me, that’s because the rewards of my motherhood seem to flow towards me more than from me on any given day, to the point that I honestly feel I should thank my children for the love and joy they bring to my life.

But this iteration of Mother’s Day, as a call to action and justice—that feels real to me. It feels important. It feels powerful.

Mothers are powerful. Yes, we are. Helicopter moms and grizzly bear moms and tree hugger moms and granola moms and stay at home moms and working moms—we have some power.

This year, let’s use it. After church and the brunch and the school crafts and the “gifts” have been attended, eaten and opened—find a way to use your power.

Donate to Glennon’s Compassion Collective, which is feeding 6000 families every day.

Adopt a child from World Vision and become a “mother” for a child stuck in grinding poverty.

Send an email to the presidential candidate you support and the one you dislike the most and tell them why. Ask them to advocate for kids and peace.

Decide that this is the year you will become a Sunday School teacher or choir director or troop leader or coach and be an important adult in the lives of someone else’s kids.

Commit to a month of rosaries, asking the Blessed Mother to bring peace and love to this world.

Mothers are powerful and the world needs us.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Making the Pieces Fit: The True Story of My Quilt

In 2012, my recovery from postpartum anxiety coincided with the first Fall in 35 years when kids went back to school, and I did not.

Instead, I stayed home with a 5 month old who still took two naps a day. I found myself with a lot of time on my hands—twitchy hands that needed something to do.

At first, to battle the guilt and stigma I still felt, I allowed them to feed me. Graham crackers and Nutella. In November my friends ran a Nutella intervention but by then, the 15 lbs of damage was done.

I needed something else to do.

I’m going to make a quilt, I decided.

I know. Of all the things. But when I was younger, we had a third grandma named Opal who lived down the street. In the quiet moments when she sat to watch a show, she had a stack of quilt pieces next to her that she patiently hand-stitched together into flowers and then transformed into quilts.

I can do that, I thought. I can make those flowers.

All that late Fall and Winter, I sat on the couch while Annie slept and hand-sewed flower after flower with tiny little stitches, until I had a stack of 20.

Then I discovered that by making the flowers first, I had sewed myself into a corner. I wrote about it here. I showed you these pictures:

I hoped it was all coming together.

It didn’t.

Instead, I ended up with this:

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I stopped. The next summer was rolling in and my feet were under me. I hit my stride as a stay at home mom. I joined the gym with Dana. I started writing about my postpartum experience. Shea and I had an idea that maybe we should move to Oregon.

It was a busy and fruitful time, and I didn’t need the soothing, quiet stitching. The pieces sat for almost two years.

Last Fall, when Annie joined Gabe and Kate on the first day of school, my guilt came back. For three hours every day, I was alone while everyone else in my family worked. I started feeling anxious again. My twitchy hands came back. I did not buy Nutella, but only by the grace of God.

One morning, I pulled out my sewing box to mend a shirt of Gabe’s and there it was: my pile of flowers.

I am going to finish this quilt, I thought. I’m not going to read any directions either.

Whatever happens will be enough.

I knew this was about more than a quilt. It was therapy in those early months, soothing stitch after soothing stitch, quiet and productive. But then it became a reflection of me, shattered into pieces, and trying to fit them back together again.

When they didn’t fit back they way they were, well. It took a while for me to understand what that meant.

It was supposed to be queen sized. It ended up 2 feet by 3 feet. The edging is ugly on one side, although in the process of doing it wrong, I learned how to do it right next time. I used white thread on blue cotton, which is very unforgiving. I threw away more of my flowers than I kept, hours of hard work into the scrap bin. It doesn’t cover anyone completely.

But it’s enough.

I was supposed to be Mom Invincible. From the outside, I looked pretty good, but underneath was a mess waiting to happen. I was the woman everyone could rely on, a reputation which is very unforgiving in a personal crisis. Then I was forced to show my crooked stitches to survive. Some of the things I held onto were unnecessary and I cut them away. I don’t have to be so big. Lots of things are not my job. I am scarred and have spoken my scars.

I am enough.

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Some people would never show this quilt, but I do. It sits on the big chair in the living room, visible to everyone who comes through my front door.

It’s the truth about me, and so many mamas just like me. We had a vision of what life could be. For a while, the pieces didn’t fit, or make sense.

Maybe we thought about quitting.

But we didn’t, and through love and prayer and hard work, we put it back together into something whole. Crooked. Wiser. Messy. Precious.

May is Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month. Perinatal mood disorders can start in pregnancy. They can look like depression, mania, anxiety. If you have a history of mental health issues in your life or your family—as I did—you may be at higher risk. But PMD can strike any women in any pregnancy.

Here’s what you do:

If you need immediate help, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

#askher: Ask the pregnant and newly delivered moms around you if they are ok.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call the Ob/GYN first and then visit www.postpartum.net for support. If the doctors cannot or do not help, call Postpartum Support International at 1-800-944-4773.

PSI Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month Blog Hop

Living in the Digital Age

These past few weeks have been filled with nostalgia and dust. Lots of dust. At the age of 93, my Grandma Betty has moved into an assisted living home. Her health is touch and go, her eyesight is bad, and sometimes, she just can’t remember to eat. For us grandkids, this is devastating. Grandma Betty has lived in the same house since the 1950s. And it was last redecorated, I think, in 1979. Translate that into this: for my whole life, nearly, that place has not changed. No new carpet. No different sofa. The lamps? Same spot. The kitchen? Can we call it “vintage chic” or perhaps just waaaayyyyy outdated?

Walking into Grandma Betty’s house is a like walking into a time capsule. It looks the same as it has for my entire life. It smells the same. My handprint that we gave to Grandma and Grandpa when I was two months old is still on the original nail from 1975. So leaving it has shaken us to the core.

For my cousins Dawn and Sarah, and me, going to Grandma’s house was like going to a safe-haven. At Grandma’s house, we played ping-pong with Grandpa Art, we dug in the sand box (remember when we would find the toys we had buried the previous summer?), and we had Coke floats, and fires in the fireplace. We would eat breakfast on the patio, wrapped in Grandma’s fluffy pink robe. We would go for bike rides or walks in the evening. We tried on her clip-on earrings and her amazing shoes. Rummy Cube, Rack-O, Clue, Uno.

But no matter what we did, even just sitting together reading books, there was always an abundance of love. We were cherished, treasured, indulged. We were the smartest kids, or the funniest. She would say, “Why I never!” through her giggles. We were the most talented. “Where did you ever learn to do that?” And no matter what we did, it was cataloged in pictures.

The picture albums at Grandma’s house begin in the year 1969. Everywhere she went, her camera went too. There is evidence of our Halloween costumes (in 1980 I was Chewbacca), evidence of our school performances. There are snap shots from evenings spent climbing trees or afternoons painting her white picket fence. And going through these pictures has been a blast. Dawn and I have spend more than a few hours gasping (Do you remember how high my bangs were?), groaning (I can’t believe I wore that!), giggling (We look like a couple of sunburned lobsters!), and remembering (I felt so special when Grams and I went shopping together.).

In her closets, too, I have found some real treasures… more pictures of Grandma’s brother, Marvin who went down over the Pacific in WWII:

Pictures of her sister Mazie, who my older daughter is named after:

Pictures of her first (yes, first) fiancé, Warren:

And a real gem, a picture of her mother’s mother, dated 1871:

Finding all of these treasures has made me reflect on my own record keeping. It’s easier than ever, now, to take pictures. And don’t pretend that you’re not just like me and that you don’t whip out your camera for an especially good latte:

We snap pictures and videos like crazy, but how many of us still get them printed out? I know that I don’t. And right now, I’m a little sad about that.

What about when Mazie and Violet’s children are packing up my house? Will they sit in front of a computer and look at my iCloud? Will it even exist any more? Will they find their mamas’ baby pictures? See them in funny outfits?

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Will they find pictures of me and my dad, and see his nose or his smile in their own faces? And one more question… Does it really matter? Do these events, unimportant to everyone but us, have a place in our lives?

My answer is a resounding, “Yes!” Yes, they matter. Maybe not to the world. Maybe not to anyone but me. But they still matter. They provide a sense of belonging. In the pictures I can still feel the emotion of the moment, and I realized that Grandma and Grandpa were there, sharing them with me. Here’s the literal moment that I caught the final out for a CIF softball title:

Here’s where I laid my head on my dad’s shoulder on a Saturday:

Or when I signed my national letter of intent to go to University of Virginia, at 10:55pm, in Austin, Texas, she has written:

In the older pictures, pictures of my mother as a teenager, I see the hope and sparkle in her eyes and I realize that she was a girl before she was my mom:

I see Nana, Betty’s mother, standing with pride on the porch of her home that had just been painted, a home that she purchased, maintained, and lived in all on her own until she was 103:

This is where I am from. This is the very fiber of my being. These are the moments, big and small, that made up my life. And I am grateful to have seen them again.

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