Impending mother-in-lawness
Trip Start
Jun 23, 2010
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Trip End
Jun 29, 2010
Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada
Sunday, August 23, 2009
My son Tristan and his fiancee Alice met in Toronto at grad school. Alice is from San Francisco. I live on an island between Victoria and Vancouver. We have had only a few brief meetings to prepare for one of the most fraught relationships in a family. We do like each other, but with so little knowledge we are bound to step on each other's toes inadvertently. To illustrate:
They visited in August, and I thought it would be a great idea to find my mother-of-the-groom (MotG) dress while they were here so that Alice could approve it. This would be a formal wedding in a Roman Catholic cathedral, so something long and ritzy yet fairly modest was called for. Mindful of Toronto's heat and humidity, I also wanted something that could breathe. With upper arms that could feed a whole tribe of starving cannibals, sleeves were a must. I look like left-over porridge in beige, but there are many other colours of a beauteous but retiring nature which would fulfill the spirit of the motherly injunction. So: an explicit, but not (I thought) overly restrictive set of criteria.
However, an increasingly frantic troll through the shops of Victoria and Sidney reduced me to a state of despair. There appeared to be three categories of dress on offer: teeny-bopper Cinderella-like grad ball-gowns with a bolero added to cover those unfortunate middle-aged arms, clingy little jersey numbers for the MotG who has kept her figure but lost her man and is on the hunt for a new one, and stately robes suitable for Queen Elizabeth or your grandmother.
Now it seemed to me that a prolonged and detailed reporting of this dress-shopping expedition of doom would show Alice how very important her wedding and her opinion were to me, so I vented freely, thus violating the second of the MotG rules. I swiftly learned that one does not flout accumulated womanly wisdom with impunity. Alice was in the middle of helping to organize the wedding of her dear friend, and was also getting increasingly edgy about her own upcoming marriage preparations with her mother half a continent away. A future mother-in-law squawking about how extremely difficult one tiny, unimportant part of the wedding prep was did not go down well. Alice nobly hid this from me instead of boffing me one, and it wasn't until my daughter Elizabeth told me bluntly to shut up that I realized I was making things worse for Alice. Sigh.
