This must have been the three-day weekend for symbolically moving on.
Spoonforkfulls had a jeweler cut off her wedding ring, and I gave my wedding dress to the Brown Elephant.
I was about a size ten when I got married four years ago. My wedding dress, which was just a white cotton day dress that I bought on super sale at Marshall Field’s, might have even been a size eight. Whatever size it was, it doesn’t fit now and hasn’t fit since my first anniversary.
I remember the day not just because it was my first ever wedding anniversary, but also because, although I was unaware of it at the time, it was the day I took my first shaky step towards fat acceptance. And by “first shaky step,” what I really mean is that my first wedding anniversary was the day my carefully constructed world of “permanent lifestyle changes” and atypical results collapsed down around me in a spectacular heap.
Like I said, my wedding dress was a white cotton day dress. I was in law school at the time, and unsurprisingly, had very few occasions for which a white cotton day dress was a suitable garment. About six months into marital bliss, I decided that I would wear my wedding dress when my husband and I went out to dinner to celebrate our first anniversary. It’s a cute idea, and it would have been a lovely and appropriate sartorial choice, except of course when our first anniversary rolled around, the dress was way too small.
I’m sure I’ve written about this before on this blog, but in the interest of not making anybody dig through archives, let me offer a bit of back story: Like most people, I yo-yo dieted to varying degrees of success starting at about age eight, up through and including my penultimate diet, a stint on Weight Watchers beginning in 2002, which resulted in my losing about 80 pounds (still never made my goal weight, though). I then went to law school, and realized that the level of intellectual, physical, and mental stamina required to perform at an even remotely acceptable academic level necessitated that I eat more than 1000 calories a day. I also resented using my precious free time counting stupid points, and let’s face it. Sometimes when I was on my fifth straight hour in the library, denying myself just about everything that I loved the only thing keeping me together emotionally was cookies. So, while on some level, I recognized that staying on Weight Watchers and academic success at law school were completely incompatible, on another, deeply denial-laden level, I was sure that, having lose eighty pounds, there was no way I would gain them back. I had made a Lifestyle Change! The Fates of Weights wouldn’t be so cruel as to render all of my hard work and self-deprivation for naught. Surely, the fact that I was suspending my Weight Watchers account for law school, and not for a love of cheese cake or abject laziness or some other fundamental moral failing, meant that I would find myself on the “right” side of that ninety-five percent when everything was said and done.
Yeah, sorry, no. My first anniversary fell the summer after my second year of law school, and that wedding dress was too small by at least two sizes, and let me tell you. I completely lost my shit. Here is my beloved husband, dressed up and ready to go out to dinner at an expensive restaurant, and here I am, sitting on the couch in a t-shirt sobbing my face off because I had failed to do what nearly every other human being who manages to lose weight by simply eating less and exercising more had failed to do. I didn’t see it like that at the time, of course. All I saw was failure. Sure, I had great grades in law school and had secured a fantastic summer clerkship and had, concurrently, just successfully completed one year of marriage to the love of my life but I was also FAT, and thus a FAILURE, and thus WORTHLESS, and thus the money it would cost to feed me at a fancy restaurant, not to mention the cost for labor, materials, shipping, etc., that a new dress in my dreadful new size, would be utterly wasted on me. Oh pathos, up yours!
Eventually, I got it together and donned a skirt and shirt that I derided at the time as “fat clothes” (which I have long ago jettisoned as too small) and actually enjoyed dinner. Not long after, I got a prescription for anti-depressants and then some therapy and then read Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and then got turned on to Shapely Prose by a friend who will always hold a special place in my heart for that very reason, and while I still have my moments (had one on Friday that I might write about related to the realization, shocking to absolutely no one but me, that I have back fat) I’m doing okay.
But I still hung on to my wedding dress. At first, I had an idea that I would return to Weight Watchers with that hoary goal of Fitting Back into My Wedding Dress. When that didn’t work out, I decided I should keep the dress because it was my wedding dress and that seemed like something I should keep, even though it was far from the kind of heirloom quality, bespoke garment that I would wish to force, I mean, pass on to my hypothetical children. Then I kind of forgot about it until Saturday when my husband and I tackled the long-delayed but very necessary task of cleaning out the larger of the two closets in our apartment and there it was.
I took the dress, entombed in four-year-old dry cleaner’s plastic, from the back of the closet and regarded it at arm’s length for a minute before stuffing it in a hideously floral and broken wheeled suitcase that my mother pawned off on us last Christmas with the probably undeserved benediction, “Stupid dress, you made me have a nervous breakdown on my first wedding anniversary!”
And just like that, it was gone.
I should probably get my wedding ring resized (again), too, but I can still get it off with the aid of some lubricant (oh hush) so I think I’ll wait until October and see if summer is making me as puffy as I suspect that it is. And congratulations and high-five to Spoonforkfuls.
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July 6, 2009 at 1:01 pm
spoonfork38
Congratulations to you, too! :)
I haven’t let go of my wedding dress, yet, since my daughters might like to play dress up in it someday, supposing they ever grow the shoulders to keep it in place . . . plus it’s at my mother’s in its dry cleaning box, and if I remind her she still has it, she’ll send it to me, plus five boxes of other stuff I don’t have room for. . .
Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, for now.
However, you’ve inspired me to purge my (local) wardrobe again and finally get rid of that little black velvet formal I wore freshman year!
July 6, 2009 at 2:46 pm
OTM
Oh, if my dress were something special or if I had children I might have hung on to it for those very legit reasons. But I am sure that somebody (maybe a bride to be, who knows) who shops at my local thrift store will get way more enjoyment out of wearing that dress than I get out of forgetting that it exists/only thinking of it in terms of The Day I Nearly Had A Nervous Breakdown.
July 6, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Emerald
More congrats to you on an important realization.
This reminds me of my first marriage. I lost a lot of weight (I went down from 145-ish to 128) from stress and rushing around. Two ironies: one, I felt crappy and exhausted on the day. And two, neither of the two people whose opinions really mattered told me I looked beautiful. Not my mother, who I now realize was emotionally incapable of ever saying it to me, nor my then groom, who years later, after our divorce, told me he always ‘really’ wanted a skinny wife but had settled for me in the belief that he could get me to lose the weight.
For the sake of clearing space at my mother’s, the dress in its box came with me when I moved in with my new boyfriend (now husband). We found it one day during a clearout, and only then did I realize how much I’d had to have it taken in – it was maybe a size 8. It was an ivory, beaded, rose-strewn Princess Diana confection, and styles had changed so much I couldn’t even sell it in the small ads, so I ended up donating the thing.
For marriage #2, I wore red, and I did not lose any weight before the day. While nine years on I’m thinking of having a new bodice in another style made to go with the skirt, it still fits, simply because my weight is where it settles when I don’t worry about it. Also, this marriage has already lasted longer than the first, so I figure we must be doing something right!
July 6, 2009 at 2:47 pm
OTM
Ooof, Emerald, that realization about your mom and first husband sounds painful. I’m so glad that you’re in a better place now – a place worth celebrating with a lovely new bodice to your beautiful red wedding skirt!
July 6, 2009 at 4:30 pm
JBigAdventure
Thanks for this OTM. I had a similar experience except that for me law/grad school was when I lost about 100 lbs of weight by exercising a few hours a day and eating less. I actually really liked the exercising (the eating less I liked less:), but then I got a job and finished my dissertation at the same time and my life became insane work-all-the-time craziness and I stopped the couple hours of exercising (which I miss, cause yes, I’m crazy like that) and also allowed myself to feed my body what it said it needed for energy. Now I’m back to my pre-five-year-“lifestyle-change” weight and I have a bunch of those old clothes. No wedding dresses for me, but still…
July 6, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Halle
Both my wedding dresses would be too small now. My first wedding I wore a blue dress with a white lace collar. It was very elegant, and looked good on me. I don’t remember what size it was. For my second wedding, I made a wedding dress out of a beautiful silk crepe. It was between a 14 and a 16 with all the alterations. I spent weeks hand beading the lace. It’s up in my MIL’s attic. It’s a nice dress, but I am sure it’s dated. I’ll give it away some day. I can’t wear it any more.
I’m glad you made peace and let go of that dress that made you unhappy. Life is too short for that kind of unhappiness!
July 7, 2009 at 7:55 am
the fat nutritionist
What a lovely story.
I’ve kept my own wedding dress, but I have no idea what size it is, since it was custom-made. I guess I was about a size 16/18 when it was made. I’ve never even considered trying it on again! Absolutely no way it would fit, especially after (now) ten years.
But it’s interesting the little symbolic choices that people make when shifting to a different perspective, like fat acceptance. I guess mine, at the time, was sending back a pair of high boots that were too small to fit my chubby calves. I was losing weight in the hopes of fitting into them — when I realized, I didn’t want to diet any more, and I wanted to learn to live with myself as I was. So I sent them back and got shorter ones that fit.
It was remarkably liberating.