Brides Against Breast Cancer

I have long known that the most important item of clutter to let go of will be my wedding gown. I'm four foot eleven. There's very little chance my daughter or anyone I know would ever be short enough to use it, assuming they would even want to when it's 20-30 years out of date. If it were clean, I think I could let it go easier. We could never afford to have it cleaned after the wedding, and the early years were lean ones to say the least. So any extra money we had from time to time was spent on things or experiences we valued more than the cleanliness of my wedding gown. It's never been housed neatly in a box. It spent five years hanging in a plastic cleaners sack within inches of a bright window. Talk about good preservation conditions! Since the big move, it has literally had no home. It has gone from a pile on the floor of our closet to a pile in the trunk of our car, to being used as a Halloween costume (which proved I'll never be able to fit into it properly again after my ribs expanded during child-bearing), to a pile on top of the stack of storage containers in my bedroom...and everything in between. There is no where to put it, and it's dirty and slightly torn around the bottom edges from walking across campus to our reception site after the wedding. I don't need to keep it. But I do. I hauled it all the way across the country with me because of its sentimental value. But why? My feelings toward the thing are bittersweet. It never looked that good on me. The lady who altered it said it couldn't be altered to make the front smooth in the way I wanted, so I resigned myself to that fact and tried to stand up straight to disguise it. It buckled in an annoying fashion, and I didn't like that, but there was nothing I could do about it at that point. However, my brilliant photographer cleverly had me contort myself for my bridal portraits in a way that not only made the dress look stunning, but it made me look like I had something to fill it up! The three-quarter length portrait makes me feel good about how I looked, even though I know it bugged me that, after seven inches were removed from the bottom, it was a poor choice as far as its shape/proportion for my body type. (And I LOATHE the portrait my mom has hanging in her house because she insisted on its being a full-length shot to match my sister's. I feel bad every time I see it there.) I loved how the buttons looked down the back, but that was never entirely captured on film, so that's too bad. But mainly I bought it because it was 75% off, and it was the nicest cheap dress I could find, and I loved its simplicity and how it looked on me when I was standing on a tall box so it flowed down all the way. After alterations, however, I was a little disheartened, but still on the wedding high so I didn't let it get me down.

Clearly, it needs to either go away so someone else can use it, or be reincarnated. I have imagined how great it might be to have someone who knows what they're doing make it into a fancy dress for Ava to wear as a child. I thought about asking Ginger if we could do that for Ava's flower girl dress for her upcoming wedding, but it would clash with Gin's dress color, so I didn't. I have thought about cutting large sections of fabric from it, preserving the button section in the back, and keep those parts for Ava to use in her wedding one day if she should choose to make them into her ring bearer's pillow or a table covering or something. But then I'm mutilating the dress and ensuring that it will never get used as a dress again.

If I were an average or tall size, and I felt sure someone could use it despite the dirty & frayed bottom edge (alter it shorter), I would probably have sucked up my sentimentality and taken it to a consignment shop or even Goodwill by now. But I just don't believe it would be useful as it is. So then I go back around to the idea of making it into a fancy dress for Ava...even if it's just for dress-up during the upcoming phase of imagination.

Anyway, I found a way less conflicted brides can bless others with their wedding gowns, bridesmaids gowns, etc. Through the Making Memories Breast Cancer Foundation, brides can donate these things for the foundation to auction off to raise money for breast cancer research. It's called Brides Against Breast Cancer, and I think it's a great idea. I only wish my gown were an average length, clean, and useable to them so that I would stop saving it for "something."