The Dress Made Me Do It

The following story is based (loosely) on true events. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Once upon a time, in a quaint little PNW village that overlooked bountiful blueberry fields and a slough, there lived a doting mother named Jewelee. Her children were grown and gone so Jewelee doted over her dogs, her flowers, and her husband. One day her beloved son announced his engagement to a fair maiden. Delighted, the mother set out on a quest to find a festive frock for their wedding.

Jewelee freely admitted that she spent too much time brooding over a dress, scrolling through websites, visiting shops, buying and returning gowns of various styles and colors and lengths, exasperating salesclerks, friends, and family, especially her poor husband. Finally, a month before the event, she found “the one.” It was elegant but not overstated, it coordinated beautifully with the wedding hues, and it fit well.

“I have made up my mind,” she declared decisively to her husband who simply smiled back at her, wisely saying nothing but secretly wondering if it were really true.

Yes, she had decided… until she was informed of a color change. She deemed her color choice a little too close for comfort and well, she didn’t want to be matchy-matchy with anyone. No problem. She ordered the same dress, in the same size, but in the navy rather than the stormy blue. And she waited.

Every day Jewelee checked for the gown’s arrival and every day it did not come. She checked the front porch, the side porch, and the mailbox. She checked around the corner of the house on the patio where the delivery person hid packages from time to time. Still nothing. Twice a day she checked the Amazon app on her phone and on her computer. “Out for delivery,” the tracking system teased. She willed the little dotted line from the warehouse icon to the delivery truck icon to connect to her house icon within the promised fourteen-day period. Finally, after twenty-five of the longest, most laborious days of waiting, the gown arrived, just one short week before her planned departure.

No matter, she reasoned in her mind as she sighed with satisfaction. The dress was here, and she could hardly wait to finish her workday and try it on. Jewelee was bursting at the seams with anticipation. Little did she know that she was about to burst seams literally.

Panic struck as she gently coaxed the unforgiving chiffon over her ample hips. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!!” She screamed a string of expletives loud enough to wake the neighbors’ napping newborn. The long-awaited dress barely fit. It was so tight she had to walk with her knees pressed together taking short, dainty Geisha girl like steps across the tiled bathroom floor. She stood in front of the mirror and tightened every muscle as if her body was silly putty and she could somehow magically morph her shape.  There was no way she would be able to sit comfortably in it.

Aggravated and acrimonious, she attempted to remove the dress over her head. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead and in the center of her back as she shimmied the dress a little further up her torso to her shoulders trying desperately not to tear it.  She was stuck! Claustrophobia set in and she stumbled around her bedroom, her arms flailing in the air, the dress half on half off, like a mediocre escape artist whose straight jacket malfunctioned. She yelled for help, but the gown was around her head now and muffled her voice. Her husband was nowhere to be found, so her youngest son came to her aid and rescued her from the costume’s clutches. She prayed he wouldn’t be scarred for life.

When her breathing eventually slowed, and oxygen returned to her body and brain, she doubled-checked the confirmation emails and then read the dress label. Had she made a mistake when ordering? Both displayed the same size as the previous dress. But when she laid one dress on top of the other, even her untrained eye could perceive that it was cut smaller, by an entire inch she estimated, maybe more. How could this have happened?

Jewelee envisioned a dark, crowded sweat shop, where a newly hired and therefore inexperienced employee stumbled under the weight of the mountain of material he was charged to carry through narrow aisles, depositing fabric at each workstation and bumping the shoulders of every dressmaker seated at archaic black trundles sewing at fever pitch. The girl working on what would be Jewelee’s dress must not have realized that her hands swerved, and she got off track as she mindlessly guided the material under the sewing machine, unknowingly stitching the seams a little too wide and therefore the dress, Jewelee’s dress, a little too narrow.

Jewellee blinked away the images with feigned forgiveness, embracing the reality of the situation. There was no time to order a new dress. Besides, there was no guarantee another one would be the correct size either.  Her next thought was to have the dress altered. She called the only local seamstress she knew and explained her dire situation. “Happy to help,” the dressmaker exclaimed exuberantly from the other end of the line. “Hang on Honey while I check my calendar.” Her first opening? Not for three whole weeks!

Jewelee tried the dress on the next day, this time with the shapewear she stole away to purchase in the dark of the previous night. She stared into the mirror ruefully. It helped, but not enough.

So, she determined to do what any God-fearing red-blooded American woman would do in her situation.

“I am going on a diet,” she divulged sheepishly to a dear friend, minutes before their weekly podcast espousing the benefits of sustainable lifestyle changes in nutrition, movement, sleep, and stress management to improve health.

“A diet,” the friend repeated the word with a downward inflection to her voice, scrunching her eyebrows in concern and confusion. “Are you sure,” she said very slowly, as if trying to persuade Jewelee from jumping off a cliff.

A diet was the exact antithesis of what Jewelee had been preaching and teaching for ten plus years now. The exact opposite of how she lived. Lifestyle is the better way, the upper road, the journey. DIET was practically a four-letter word in her world.

“I can’t help it,” Jewelee rationalized. “It’s the dress. The dratted dress is making me do it,” she explained in hushed tones as if through a screen to a priest in a confessional.

Oh, the shame of it! The hypocrisy! Still, she had to do something. Shapewear alone wasn’t going to shave that inch and a half off those hips.

Vexed by vanity, Jewelee dug deep into the recesses of her mind rummaging through the myriads of diets that were filed in her mental library. Cabbage soup? WW? South Beach? It was no use. There was a reason she stored them in her brain’s banned books section.  

She eventually concocted a version of intermittent fasting mixed with protein-sparing modified fasting, and a dollop of clean keto, just to stir things up. She measured her food. She measured her ketones. She measured her hips.

Every day she rode the recumbent bike HIIT style and pumped iron every other day. She added Pilates exercises to target crucial areas and even used a near infrared light box on said areas to persuade her mitochondria to their increase energy output.  

With the willpower of an Olympic body builder, she ate white fish and nonfat cottage cheese and cucumbers. She was a woman on a mission, focused on one thing and one thing only: she was going to sit comfortably in her dress at her son’s wedding a week from Saturday.

Jewelee’s plan seemed to be working until Monday when her right foot swelled up for some unknown reason. Probably a stress fracture from all the jumping rope. Yes. She jumped rope, too. There was no way her foot would be able to fit in, let alone dance in, the three-inch heels she planned on wearing. With ice now strapped to her ankle, Jewelee fussed and fumed like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters after forcing her fat foot into an unwilling glass slipper.

The proverbial third strike struck Tuesday morning when she woke up with a painful, blood-shot eyeball! Now what?! Pink eye? Iritis? An allergic reaction to the eye makeup she had to practice wearing?! Even if the dress and shoes somehow miraculously fit, her red eyes would ruin the pictures! Now she’d have to take precious time away from food prep and exercise to go see an indifferent doctor then stand in an interminable line at an out of the way pharmacy for whatever magic potion was going to make her eyes better.

If her ketotic breath was bad, her mood was worse. She cried silent tears of mental anguish like a spoiled toddler whose balloon just burst.

Yet, when the departure day arrived, she faced it with the equanimity of Queen Esther and the voice of Doris Day. “If it fits, if fits. Que sera sera,” she sang in her mind as she boarded the plane to Atlanta with two dresses in tow along with an additional pair of sensible flats, and Visine. To get the red out. Just in case.

The day of the wedding came, and Jewelee found herself running errands and doting on her children rather than thinking about her dress dilemma. She picked up her daughter’s dress from one location and delivered it to another. She carefully ironed the creases out of her son’s pleated wedding shirt. She drove over hill and dale to fetch the wedding rings. But time grew short, and she could put the inevitable off no longer. She had to get dressed.

Standing in the closet staring blankly at both gowns, she wondered what to do when three of the most lovely and talented god-sisters appeared. “Don’t worry, we can fix it!” they humbly proclaimed with great assurance, producing a sewing kit from thin air. They poured over the gown’s construction with keen attention to detail. After a few precise snips to let the seam out here, and expert reinforcing stitches well-placed there, la voila! Jewelee could sit!

The wedding was beautiful, and Jewelee was so enraptured by her son and his bride she didn’t notice herself or her dress at all. The lovely couple were married, and they would live happily ever after.

Jewelee went home to reclaim her healthy habits and reflect on her foolishness. She sighed at her silliness and chortled at her childishness.  Starving for style? Good health is the best fashion. A dress may dazzle for a night, but a healthy lifestyle is your lifelong light.

 A hungry heart won’t fill a dress. Better a nourished soul than a fleeting fit.

….and that’s why it’s called Weigh Different.