Karen Stabiner

 Mother of the Bride

Romancing the Stone

Jesse wants to meet me for coffee, and I bet I know why. What I don’t know is why I’m not prepared.

Of course he intends to propose to my daughter, Sarah; the news is merely that it’s imminent. Of course she’ll say yes. Even I, with my perfervid imagination, cannot concoct a scenario in which she turns him down. I’ve had plenty of time to think of the right thing to say, and yet all I can manage is a hug and a “mazel tov,” since Yiddish seems to be the default language for monumental good news when I’m otherwise speechless.

This is the inaugural moment of my tenure as the mother of the bride, and I’ve blown it. A hug and congratulations is not the memorable response that Jesse will recall and recount for decades. You’d think a writer could muster something more. I better start working on my toast.

Wait. My pinball brain lights up with a bigger idea: I offer Jesse a diamond for the engagement ring, and we make a date for him to come by and look at the jewels.

There aren’t many to speak of. I lead an unadorned life, probably in reaction to my mother’s defining proposition, which boiled down to “I wear jewelry, therefore, I am.” I have never bought myself anything more than the occasional cheap earrings, because given the choice between a serious pair and a plane ticket, I always took the trip. I rely on hand-me-downs: Little diamond studs that belonged to my mother, minus the weird gold teardrops that are supposed to hang from them; my father’s old watch, which works every now and then; his favorite ring; a locket my mother got when she was born that’s prettier than the one I got when I was.

The only likely candidate for the ring is a stone from my grandmother’s wedding ring. My mother gave it to me about 10 years ago — or rather, gave me the stones reset in a new ring made for my grandparents’ 50th anniversary — because she thought I was too old not to have a diamond more substantial than the earrings she’d already given me.

“It’s the ugliest ring I’ve ever seen,” she said, “but you might be able to do something with the stones.” She wasn’t exaggerating. The 1921 original might have been nice. The 1971 redo looked like a freeway on-ramp, with very small diamonds circling up to the bigger stone, the etched-gold setting a fair approximation of worn concrete.

Sarah was taking a jewelry-making class in high school at the time, so she designed a thin white-gold chain with the small diamonds set into it and the bigger stone at the center. A jeweler turned the drawing into a necklace I’ve worn ever since, the stone nestled just below my collarbone.

When I got home from coffee with Jesse, I took off the necklace and held the chain tight around my ring finger, to see what the diamond might look like on Sarah’s hand. It was pretty perfect.

3 Generations of DNA

As it turns out, Sarah has had the same idea, which she mentions barely a week later, when Jesse is out of town. She wonders, on a purely theoretical and hypothetical basis, you understand, if I might consider letting her have the diamond for an engagement ring. Tiny Sarah and ancient Ethel met twice and shared a rapturous interest in the little singing birds in a big cage at the nursing home where Ethel lived as she headed for 102. Sarah grew up light on relatives. She liked having a great-grandmother, and Ethel liked being one, having started to wonder, aloud, why God kept her hanging around. When I told her I was pregnant, she wrote back to say how pleased she was to have an answer to that question.

I feint. I’m happy that Sarah wants the stone she’s going to get, but I can’t tell her that.

“Well,” I say. ”Let me make sure first that it isn’t a rhinestone or something,” which gets a chuckle and buys me some time.

Here’s a dilemma: Whom should I betray? I can ruin Jesse’s plan and tell Sarah that the diamond’s on its way — or I can keep a secret from my flesh and blood, which feels like lying, and hope that she’ll forgive me.

The rhinestone joke buys me time — and having considered the possibility that the stone’s a fake, I figure I ought to consult an expert. I find a jeweler whose testimonials outstrip the competition and show him what I hope is a very old diamond.

He smiles. “It’s a 97-year-old stone.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s imperfect,” he says. “It was cut by a person. Not a laser.”

There’s a small note of apology in his voice, and yet I’m suddenly lighthearted. Cut by a person and, so, imperfect. This seems just right for the dice-roll of happily ever after. At the moment I reside in the gap between divorce and dating, where I ponder whether to clamber up the opposite slope or just plant tomatoes and settle in right here, watching whatever romance Turner Classic Movies sends my way. I am a wiser realist and a die-hard romantic, so imperfection appeals to me. I just hope Jesse won’t be disappointed.

He isn’t. He drops by very soon after to claim the necklace on his way to the jeweler.

I wanted to wear it right up to the last minute, so I undo the clasp, drop the necklace into a little fabric pouch, and give it to him.

“I’m handing it off with three generations of DNA on it,” I say, and then we stand there. He wants to dash off and yet he doesn’t, I want him to sail away and yet I don’t — so I put on my coat and walk the block to the subway with him, to drag this out. We linger for a moment before he says thank you, turns and hurries down the stairs. I cannot say for sure that his feet touch the ground.

The Illusion and the Magic

Sarah knows that I do not procrastinate, so I have to say something to her about the diamond. For days I hide behind texts about how insanely busy I am, but we have a date to listen to an old friend who’s singing at a Times Square club, and I can’t pull off phony excuses in person. I decide to tell her that she can have the diamond — but not that Jesse already has it — when we go out to eat after the show. By the time she figures out how to tell him, the ring will be ready.

The show runs late — no time for supper on a work night — but I have made up my mind. As we head for the subway, I scan the neighborhood for a proper setting. Sixth Avenue and 50th Street is a midnight construction zone, but there is a little stand of trees at 49th Street, still wearing their tiny ivory holiday lights. I march her over, put my hands on her shoulders, and tell her she can have the diamond, which conveniently eclipses the question of why I’m not wearing it.

I can summon up the sense memory of a handful of fierce, lingering hugs over time, having to do with various animals who became part of our family, or wildly decorated birthday cakes, or first jobs or books published or whatever we agree matters. The northwest corner of 49th and Sixth becomes part of that family library, the moment when a ghost great-grandmother, a frail grandmother, and Sarah and I share a single embrace. All that history. All that flawed and well-intentioned love.

And that’s where this part of the story ends — not with the proposal, not with the wedding plans, the dress, the food, the invitations, none of it.

This ends, even as it begins, with a man dashing down the subway stairs, a diamond necklace in his jacket pocket. A woman anticipating a ring that holds then and now together. And a pending mother of the bride who knows flat out what an illusion romance can be — and yet indulges, despite everything, in a glorious dose of why not.

No Seat in the Fitting Room for Me

Sarah is on the other side of a heavy white curtain with Michael, a genial young man with precision stubble. I am not allowed to join them. Mothers are not welcome in wedding-dress fitting rooms, it seems, not even in rooms as large as this one. With a practiced gesture, Michael herded Sarah and a bunch of dresses into the room and pulled the curtain shut behind him. I’m on the exile side before I can open my mouth to protest.

It’s not like I was going to make trouble, you know. I would’ve sat quietly on that little straight-backed chair, because after all, what is a fitting-room chair for if not to be sat on?

For her tote bag, I guess.

We’re not buying anything no matter how much we love it, but Michael doesn’t need to know that. We are here to do research, and I’d say I earned a seat in the fitting room for having aced my first mother of the bride wardrobe test: When a bride-to-be mentions that there’s a trunk show of dresses that are really beautiful but too expensive, the mother of the bride is supposed to insist we take a look anyhow. Sarah was about to burst from post-proposal adrenaline and needed some way to siphon it off. She wasn’t alone in that.

She meets me for coffee near the dress shop, brimming with opinions based on the numerous online dress sites she seems to have visited. I, on the other hand, want to see her in 10 dresses, 12, 20, until she’s adrift in a snow bank of discarded lace and organza.

That isn’t how it works. There is no darting in and out of the fitting room to find another size or style. Michael escorts us along the perimeter of the showroom, wedging himself protectively between us and the racks of dresses; we can look but we cannot touch. If we see something promising, Michael lifts the hanger and turns the dress 90 degrees so that we can decide if the full view lives up to the sidelong glance.

For a moment I bristle at being told what to do by a guy we’ve known for 15 minutes. I could point out that skin oil is skin oil, whether it’s mine or Sarah’s or his. I could joke that he has forgotten to don his museum gloves. Instead, I concentrate on every dress that fails to meet Sarah’s criteria. My mother’s mantra was “It always looks different on you than it does on the hanger,” and I figure that a helpful mother of the bride sees potential in unexpected places.

But it’s too soon for outliers; my few, faint suggestions don’t make the cut. Michael pulls four likelier dresses and sequesters himself with Sarah, while the manager invites me to make myself comfortable in the airy, windowed showroom, which is decorated to resemble a country-chic living room. I smile and explain that I’m fine. I don’t want to sit down. I don’t want a glass of champagne.

The implication, I think, is that mothers of the bride start fights, and a cushy sofa or a drink will take the edge off. The implication, I think, is that the mother of the bride needs to be made docile. In my paranoid, marginalized state, I forget that girlfriends get offered champagne as well.

I position myself about two feet outside of the fitting room, and I wait, which doesn’t come naturally to me. Baby boomers are used to being the center of the universe, the population blip that defined things until our children displaced us. It’s not easy to step to the side, and harder still to be nudged by a stranger.

Not that anyone asked, but I sew well enough to have made the occasional garment for Sarah, back in the day. I can save her from poor construction, a misaligned zipper or the dread polyester. She might need me and not even know it.

As a mother, I’m proud of the autonomous Sarah. As a mother of the bride, I’d like to get a better look at those covered buttons.

Michael pulls the curtain back.

The Big Skirt Lady first appeared in Sarah’s drawings when she was too little to know what a bride was. I was married in a tea-length silk dress, so the inspiration didn’t come from photos she saw of me. But come it did, in drawing after drawing of a woman with stick hair and twig fingers, pin-dot eyes and a teacup smile, in a dress with a tiny bodice and an endless skirt.

One of her final pieces from that era is a little clay statue of a bride with Rapunzel hair, elbow length and more like spaghetti than sticks, wearing a plain white dress with a voluminous skirt. Sarah evaded the challenge of sculpting hands by hiding them behind a colorful bouquet. When it came time to pack up our California home four years ago, I kept the mysterious little bride.

I lurch into that memory and back again in the time it takes for the curtain rings to slide across the rod. As Sarah steps toward me, I understand why moms sit down and have a drink: It’s so that we don’t collapse or have a stroke. They say your entire life flashes in front of your eyes in the moment before you die. How come nobody mentioned that it happens when you’re shopping for your daughter’s wedding dress?

Sarah walks past me to a riser planted in front of a mirror, the dress clamped at the shoulders and waist with big white plastic butterfly clips because it’s two sizes bigger than she is.

Look at her: All grown up and wearing a wedding dress.

I try to stop right there, to register, again: All grown up. And wearing a wedding dress.

The skirt is silk, plain and flowing. The lace bodice has a wide neck and long sleeves, and wait, as I walk around her, who forgot to attach the back? The humble bodice winks at me, rolls over Sarah’s shoulders and plunges straight down to her waist. There, for all to see, is the back I used to tickle as we sang good night to every single person we knew, as well as some horses and dogs.

I wonder if there is any way to get this whiplash under control, even as I wonder if I want to.

Michael and the manager and the designer cluster around Sarah, clearly aware of how close they can get without intruding on a cellphone photo. They have so much to say:

Not everyone can wear long sleeves like that.

It’s so dramatic.

It’s a unique look. Not your standard bride.

Then they stop. There’s a fine line between memorable and weird. Better to let Sarah try on the other, more traditional dresses and hope she comes to the same conclusion they’ve reached.

To sweeten any deal at all, there’s a 10 percent discount if we place an order this weekend.

I think she looks beautiful. Transcendent. Magical. But I felt that way when special clothes meant a red sequined beret and Dorothy slippers, so I’m not to be trusted. It’s time to shape up, I tell myself. A good mother of the bride is analytical. It’s part of my job to get past the initial swoon, and not be swayed by a discount, even as I wonder how realistic our budget is.

The second dress looks good on her, too, but between the beaded bodice and heavy, straight silk skirt, it reminds me of something a singer might wear to perform at one of the smaller Las Vegas hotels. The third one is as flattering as can be when the fabric has the heft of damp Kleenex, and I can tell that Sarah agrees, so I don’t need to find a diplomatic synonym for limp.

And then our hour appointment is up, and we’re packed off with reminders about the discount and the wonderful sleeves.

In the days that follow I study the photos of the long-sleeved dress, looking for a sign that inaction was the smart move — and when I enlarge them I see the deal breaker in the space between Sarah’s waist and her sternum. There’s a heart worked into the lace pattern, a good six inches of symbolism right there on the bodice, as though a happy girl in a pretty dress doesn’t quite convey endless love.

That heart changes everything. Understated now seems precious. Neo-hippie. Faux country. Why not work the words “Just married” inside the heart while you’re at it? I point it out to Sarah, who if anything is more put off than I am. In a smug moment I dub it the Little House on the Prairie dress, right before I start to worry that we misjudged every other dress we saw.

I second guess because I have one chance to get this right and no idea how to. It’s like having a first child, or a one-and-only like Sarah — everything rides on an utter lack of job experience cut with an abundance of crazy love. It’s a volatile mix. At any given moment things could tip either way.

I want to find the right dress fast and I want to go shopping with Sarah forever, even though you never find the right anything on the first go and we hate to shop, even though it has to be one or the other. In the abstract, both halves of the contradiction are true. I want her to find the dress she ought to have while looking is still wacky fun. And greedy me, I want to wait outside the fitting room again and again and again.

It’s Their Wedding, and Their Wedding Planning

You may think you have her figured out: A woman of a certain age sits at a garden table in the waning hours of a Brooklyn Sunday brunch, reading a book while she finishes her meal. She considers the dappled sunlight filtered through the leaves, takes her time enjoying each bite, dawdles over her coffee. She lingers to jot a line or two in a tiny notebook. You might assume that she uses journal as a verb.

That’s my cover. In fact, I am here to check out the likely wedding venue. I travel incognito on purpose, to get a true reading, because if I’d identified myself as the mother of the bride they might have sent out a bigger salad or better coffee art. Not that I have veto power or even an equal vote. No, I visit Sarah and Jesse’s favored spot because I am genetically programmed to do so. Anything less would qualify as neglect.

The activity-director mutation runs strong among the women in my family. We are room mothers, troop leaders, refreshment committee co-chairs, PTA officers, sports team moms. My maternal grandmother volunteered for a charity called the Willing Workers, for heaven’s sake. We live to do.

But then, so does Sarah — and Jesse, as it turns out. They know what they want, which they turn into a set of priorities and a budget before I can assert the mother of the bride’s traditional right to run the show. Better yet, or worse in terms of maternal dominance, they are food-and-beverage professionals. If they were a dentist and a plumber I might be able to get some traction here, but who am I kidding. I may have thrown dinners for three dozen. They have expertise.

I am encouraged to kibitz and reminded that there will be plenty for me to do, but I will not be the wedding czar of yore, even though I know I could have pulled this off. My big challenge, it seems, will be to find ways to exercise my natural power-broker instincts.

In a rush of revisionist fervor, I see the whole thing fresh. Who’s getting married, after all? Sarah and Jesse should have exactly the wedding they want, and I should embrace my role as facilitator. I will execute; I will not even attempt to overrule. I will embrace a new, enlightened, selfless model of the mother of the bride.

And then, says the small voice of the sore loser, I will wait for them to need more from me than they think they do, because they will.

I cannot utter the word “mindful” without irony, despite decades spent in Southern California, but that is what I aspire to be. Since I have to breathe to do anything else, I will start with mindful breathing, which I practice almost every night — at 3 a.m.

Breathe in. Nice empty brain. So far, so good.

Breathe out. Tally the out-of-town guests and wonder where to put them.

Breathe in. Refocus.

Breathe out. Get out of bed to search online for cheap full-length snap-front rain ponchos to get from the hotel to the venue in a downpour.

Breathe in.

Breathe out. Scrap current version of toast and start another rewrite.

Breathe in.

Breathe out. Jot down alternatives to “mother of the bride dress” on the notepad I now keep next to the bed, for tomorrow’s internet adventure, because I am not wearing a tasteful jewel-toned sheath with matching jacket.

I give up. Rather than count sheep, I count candidates for the dance playlist we’re going to need. Before you can say Sam and Dave, I’m out.

We’re Not Dancing

But Sarah and Jesse don’t need my playlist, because they’re going with a guitar and a stand-up bass. Music to croon along to, maybe; not for the kind of dancing I associate with parties.

I don’t recall exactly what I said in response to the news, but whatever it was, it ended with an exclamation point and was a half-scale higher than my usual second alto. Shrill would not be an inaccurate description. My inner partyer cut loose before I could stop her — even as my inner hypocrite pointed out that we didn’t dance at my wedding, either.

I crossed the mindful line in a tone of voice I wouldn’t want to have directed at me. And though I backpedaled fast, it was not fast enough to avert our first mother-daughter wedding-related standoff. I was disappointed that we weren’t dancing. Sarah was disappointed that I was disappointed in such a screechy tone.

While it’s fine for me to have opinions, even strongly held ones, it is not O.K. to react in a way that pulls rank, or casts doubt on Sarah and Jesse’s mutual good judgment. I work on this for days, until I can see a danceless party in a more favorable light. What is the absence of dancing, after all, but the presence of conversation? Sarah and Jesse seem to think that their wedding guests will enjoy four hours of talk. I decide that not dancing is cause for optimism, and then I work very hard to believe me.

Dancing comes up only rarely after that, sometimes as code when a conversation takes a treacherous turn, more often as a little joke when we need to acknowledge that we have different priorities. Sarah will suggest that I throw my own dance party sometime, her smile implying that if they’re in the neighborhood, she and Jesse might drop by.

That would be my party of choice. This wedding will be theirs. Although I will falter along the way — Did you think this transition would be easy? — I understand what I’m after. Party empathy; the ability to share and endorse the happy couple’s notion of happy.

I am glad to have my footing back for as long as it lasts.

Two Families Becoming Three

When you think about it, a wedding is an earthquake on the family fault line, no matter how joyous the union. The landscape will never be the same, which might be what’s really behind the mythic temblors we sometimes hear about — the screaming fights, the tears, the huffy silences.

I don’t mean to depress you, but to raise the obvious question of who the mother of the bride is supposed to be once she’s stripped of her legal status as next of kin. The bride has a narrative arc ahead of her. The story line for the mother-of-the-bride isn’t quite as clear, with a nameless gap between that job and potential grandmotherhood. The space in the middle might be full of work, one’s own marriage, a deepening commitment to exercise — whatever you’ve come to think of as daily life. I’m trying to figure out the part that’s up for grabs.

Maybe brides and their moms fight to distract us from the paradigm shift. Maybe some mothers go all in on the party because even arguing is more fun than a midlife identity crisis. Keeps us busy.

At one point I refer to myself as an emeritus parent, which goes over about as well as the business about dancing.

Sarah informs me that I will always be her mother, which was not in doubt, though I greatly appreciate the reassurance. The question is not whether but how I will always be her mother, and the answer is unknowable because we aren’t there yet. The trick, I guess, is to make my peace with not knowing.

So in one marathon late-nighter I make a list of every single wedding question I can think of, category by category, as micro as they get. Choice of song when Sarah walks down the aisle, where to stash the tote bag with comfortable contingency shoes, type of boutonniere, and I’m just warming up. Think Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” only not so green and with nicer eyes. I spew until there is just nothing left in me.

Or think instead — better, quietly, for a mindful moment — about how much you love that girl. How sometimes it’s a relief to download all the daily-life stuff, get rid of it, and reflect on who she is and how she got here and how fiercely lucky you are to be along for some portion of the ride.

There. When Sarah was little I said that I loved her more than words, which raised a question: Did I mean more than I love words or more than words can tell?

Yes, I said. Then, and ever since.

The wedding czar sent off the list, which contained nothing Sarah and Jesse hadn’t already thought of. The wedding czar is done; long live whoever I’m about to be. It’ll come clear with time.

All That a Mother-of-Bride Dress Reveals, Inside and Out

If the first set of wedding dresses was beyond our budget, the second set is beyond belief, and we take refuge in ridicule to keep from getting depressed. In a single store in a single hour, Sarah tries on the Downton Abbey dress, the Roaring Twenties dress, and a cupcake number I dub the Operation Petticoat dress.

Doubt has sneaked into the fitting room even if I cannot, so I smile the confident smile that parents paste on when we assure our kids about things we can’t possibly yet know. Of course you’ll like the new school, the math teacher, Latin, your college roommate, college in general, sushi.

I hide behind a comforting logical fallacy: Sarah has to have the right dress, so the right dress has to exist. In the meantime, we are having a perverse kind of fun, aren’t we?

The next morning we trudge up a flight of stairs to a small, second-floor shop Sarah found in her online search. Same maternal exile from the fitting room as at the other places we’ve been to, same muffled sounds of clothes coming off and going on, same offer of couch and beverage, all of it tinged by a worry hangover from the day before.

And then the curtain parts and I understand what I’ve been missing. The right wedding dress is not a dress at all, not in the normal sense, not a set of options in terms of fabric, neckline, sleeves, waist, skirt, train. The right dress is the bride reimagined in another medium. It’s Sarah in ivory silk. Graceful and strong. Frank but with a mischievous edge. Lissome, which is not a word I toss around because its popularity peaked around the time Elizabeth Bennet said “I do.”

Neither of us loves the way the zipper peeks through the lace at the back, but within the bounds of physics, Sarah can swap this bodice for a laceless one, or replace this skirt with a slightly fuller version, because the designer likes to give her clients some flexibility.

Yesterday we had no choice. Today we have more choice than we can process, with the now-familiar discount if we buy within 48 hours.

We don’t, but this time it feels different. We stand at the calm shore of bridal-gown certainty: If Sarah had to buy a dress today, she could, so she can relax and enjoy the process of making absolutely sure. She considers a few other dresses that suffer by comparison. She drinks Champagne with her two best friends while I congratulate myself for not crashing their shopping expedition, because every bride ought to try on dresses with her friends without a parent present. We even have a vivid, blocks-long debate about a strong last-minute contender, the Audrey Hepburn dress.

And then she circles back to purchase the front-runner (no lace, the fuller of two skirts) with the discount because I take the blame for the delay and make generational allies of Sarah and the store manager. I have never had such fun reciting my credit card number. Say it proud, any of you who belong to my temporary club: I bought my daughter her wedding dress.

Now It’s My Turn

Now picture this: I am so sick that I crave antibiotics the way healthy people crave avocado toast. I slog the three blocks to the drugstore in a toxic haze of germs, and halfway there my rheumy eyes focus on a dress in a shop window.

“I’m sicker than a dog,” I tell the soignée woman in charge, in case she thought this was my normal look, “but if that dress comes in anything but pink with flowers I want to try it on.”

It does, and she has a white one I can try on to see if it fits. Ten sniffling, coughing minutes later I consider my reflection in the mirror, in an almost off-the-shoulder, almost sleeveless sheath, and I have to wonder: Where have I been all my life?

Buried, that’s where. Working women of my generation compensated for our gender by embracing what I’ll call serious clothes, dressing to disappear behind our impressive qualifications. Think tailored, think monochrome, and think, quite often, just a bit too large. The uniform may have changed from one decade to the next, yet the dynamic lingers to this day.

Sarah endorses the dress right off, which matters to me — but I lack courage, lost, for the moment, at the intersection of propriety and fun. I want to escape my sartorial past and yet not make a fool of myself, an elusive destination for someone who was bred to distrust color and pattern and considers anything that clings anywhere, even slightly, the province of people in a more fan-driven profession. I send photos to two friends whose sense of style has nothing to do with fashion, and they agree: I must buy the dress immediately.

Buoyed by their enthusiasm, I make a tactical error and expand to a second circle of advisers. Forget polls and demographics. If you want a barometer of gender identity among older women in 21st century America, ask a bunch of them for their opinions on a mother of the bride dress.

I get:

Wear black. Wear anything but black.

Spend big because your great-grandchildren will only know you from these photos.

Cheap out because honestly, you won’t get another chance to dress up like this, and it’s crazy to spend a lot for something that’ll hang in the closet.

But my favorite, by a long shot, is, “You might want to keep looking.” Fool that I am, I bite and ask why.

“You don’t have 30-year-old arms, you know.”

For weeks I visit the dress as though it were an old friend, even as I search for a more practical alternative. And I wonder: What is the bandwidth for a woman who’s old enough to have a bride for a daughter and yet feels oddly young at heart. The answer comes after I try on a dress that recalls both of my grandmothers, not on their best days, and I finally tire of my self-imposed constraints.

There is no limit on what to wear except the one inside our heads. O.K., I don’t want to know who bought the “bondage jersey” mother of the bride dress that popped up in one of my online searches, but beyond that kind of excess, anything goes.

The point, simply, is to avoid the straitjacket of should.

A bride buys prospectively, anticipating the adult life she will lead. A mother of the bride buys retrospectively, with an eye toward who she’s been all these years, and whether some part of her got stifled in the telling. The best thing to wear, I come to think, is a celebratory air.

I buy the dress. I buy shoes with heels and flowers and bows and tell myself they can go up on eBay the day after the wedding. I loan Sarah a pair of platforms she’s always coveted and I never should have bought, not so secretly pleased that she prefers them to anything that looks like a wedding shoe.

Relief washes over me, though I must remember not to chat with students when my laptop is open because of all the shapewear ads that have clustered like gnats since I searched “full slip.”

I am ready to party.

A Little Give and Take

Don’t get me wrong; I like my capable self. I just want to give my identity a little breathing room.

I relish the jobs I get as the wedding gets closer. I visit hotels that offer blocks of wedding rooms at a discount and come home with swag that ranges from self-care products to chocolates for when the products don’t suffice. I visit both the places where we’re ordering food for the morning after, having convinced Sarah and Jesse that I will be more effective face to face than they would be online. None of us can say what more effective means when ordering lox and bagels or babka, but they let me do it, probably because they can hear the steam building up between my ears.

When it comes to alterations I am unrelenting and only borderline impolite. I see what I call the burbles just below the waist on Sarah’s dress, and I see through the explanation that the fabric is too delicate and light to sit just so. For that matter, I’d like a half-inch adjustment on the waist of my dress.

Yes, I know that no one will notice either detail, but internal standards have nothing to do with an audience.

To my happy surprise, though, I know when to abandon practicality. Sarah and Jesse plan to stay at a hotel in Brooklyn, where Sarah and I will get ready together on the morning of the wedding, and it sounds so much nicer to get in an elevator rather than a cab to do so. The besuited me sees no reason to spend money and time packing when I have a perfectly good apartment. The gal in the lilting dress and the crazy shoes prevails, and books a room.

A Wedding Day Saga Ends With Words From the Heart

It has come to this: 10:30 on a Saturday night and I sit cross-legged on the hotel room floor inside a silken tent, the skirt of Sarah’s dress four inches from my face, the delicate overskirt draped over my head. I steamed the overskirt with my new portable hand-held steamer, the one I practiced with at home to make sure it didn’t sputter. Once I got into a nice rhythm, I figured I’d do the skirt, too.

One more pass on the overskirt, in case it got wrinkled sitting on my head, and I’m satisfied. I steam my dress. I steam Jesse’s clothes. I count the hours until their wedding tomorrow. Fourteen. I practice what I want to say to the bride and groom in front of all their guests and choke up, as I do every time.

Yes indeed, it has come to this. I had hoped that endless rehearsal would numb me out, but all it’s done is feed my rewrite habit. I’m revising commas at this point to avoid looking at the hurdles I seem unable to clear.

A parent ought to speak up at the wedding, don’t you think? It’s part of the ritual, along with flowers you hope somebody takes home, and music, and the occasional little kid who gets fidgety if the ceremony goes on too long. But flowers and music and kids are vibrant. If I believe the wedding movies I’ve started to watch in the name of research, parents’ comments could profitably be replaced by an over the counter sleep aid.

In truth, I don’t know what I can say at this point. Sarah and Jesse recognized the future in each other without any help from their parents. They seem to be in love whether they’re loading the dishwasher or pulling the recycling bin to the curb, in love as a basic attribute, the way she has gray eyes and he is tall. So what’s left for speeches? Be wary of adjustable rate mortgages, floss, use sunscreen particularly now that you’re in California and watch for ticks if you take a hike. Useful, but hardly the stuff of romance, which movie parents tend to reduce to bromides. And while trite may be preferable to embarrassing anecdotes from the bride and groom’s childhood, that’s an awfully low bar.

I look for the elusive sweet spot between treacle and snark, finger-wagging and support. When I finally get close, I can’t get through it tearless.

A Weepy Moment At the Reveal

The happy mother of the bride draws kindness like a magnet. My friends assure me that I am supposed to cry, as though anything less were an indication of a stony heart. They urge me to tuck a tissue into the pocket or sleeve my dress doesn’t have.

I want to do better than that. The mother of the bride, I have come to believe, serves at the pleasure of the bride and groom. I aspire to be calm for Sarah and Jesse’s sake, because they value it — and O.K., to avoid being the butt of endless jokes told to as-yet-nonexistent descendants. “So-and-so had to step in to finish reading what Karen wanted to say,” someone will reminisce, “because she could not pull herself together.”

Nope. I must rise above a genetic predisposition on my father’s side to weep at moments of great emotion. I have his thin-skinned gene in all kinds of ways, good and bad, which worries me. It does not yield easily to self-discipline.

I tell myself this is doable, though, because it has to be. I wake up the morning of the wedding and take a little walk. I have a little coffee. I lay out everything I need, check and double-check and check again. And then I take the elevator to the suite where Sarah and her cousin and her best friends have gathered.

I’m floating. I don’t even mind when Sarah disappears with her friends to put on her dress, leaving me alone to wait for the reveal.

Those of you who like to pretend that you’re above raw sentiment might as well stop reading right here.

May I live to be 100 without ever forgetting the look on Sarah’s face as she steps toward me, arms out, for an embrace that makes me cry just to recall it. Cue Judy Collins singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” because you will be able to listen to all the verses before I’m ready to continue.

Yep. This is what they call a flood of tears. I’ve seen the dress a half-dozen times, and yet I am overwhelmed at the sight of my daughter wearing it officially for the first and last time. I can’t quite stop, and Sarah is kind enough to stick with the clinch for as long as it takes, as though Jesse and the photographer weren’t waiting for her.

This can mean only one of two things: Either the cloudburst has used up all my tears or it is a harbinger of very bad things to come.

I Focus on Them

OK. We are assembled, only moments from Sarah’s walk down the aisle, so everybody out. All of you who are chattering inside my head, family, friends, advisers, naysayers, ancestors, thanks for everything, but please shut up now. I have to go it alone from here. I want to go it alone from here. Sarah and Jesse look so happy and poised and vivid, while everyone else seems a little fuzzy. People smile and say sweet things that I will not recall later on — but if the bride or groom adjusts a smile two degrees, I am mesmerized.

That’s good. That’s appropriate, I think, for the mother of the bride. Sarah and Jesse are all I want to see.

Today is my valedictory as the mother of the bride. It will be over very soon, the end of a 15-month gig that segues into a much longer run as, I don’t know, mother of the wife, I guess. Surely I can say what I want my daughter and imminent son-in-law to hear without having to blow my nose and blot around my eyes.

There’s no word-for-word transcript coming here, which is a conscious decision on my part. If I repeat what I said, you’ll feel the need to weigh in on whether I went on too long or not long enough, or you’ll consider scrapping what you’ve composed for your daughter’s wedding, or decide that “Wind Beneath My Wings” is the best choice after all. This is not a competitive sport. You can go online and listen to Frank Sinatra sing “Time After Time,” if you must, but you’re not getting context from me. It’s in everyone’s best interest that I say only this: I triumphed over my tear ducts.

The Celebration and Leftover Hairspray

Your victory might be to weep straight through a toast, or to crack wise, or to do a little dance, or to settle for the all-encompassing “L’chaim” or its cultural equivalent.

As they say at the end of all those ads, your results may vary. Or rather, your results must vary. It’s imperative, because you and your daughter are not me and my daughter.

I told Sarah and Jesse what I wanted to tell them. You write what works best for you. I mean that not as a challenge but to embolden you, as I settle back into the ranks of just folks. Think about the wedding that fits your daughter as well as that dress fit me once I found the right slip.

You might want to hear more about the wedding, too, but honestly, it’s beside the point. People showed up, laughed, got teary, hugged and kissed, ate and drank, stood for photos, just like at every other wedding. Me? The mother of the new wife celebrated to the very last. The next day I went to two dry cleaners and the shoe repair and wondered how I ended up with a big bottle of hair spray I will never use again. I hung Sarah’s bouquet upside down to dry and told her she was welcome to keep the platform shoes now that they are done being something borrowed. She probably saw that coming; I sort of hope so. I like the idea of her going to the movies in wedding feet.

I just finished walking the newlyweds’ dog, because they have a scheduling problem and my summer’s work is as portable as a laptop. I marvel at how quickly daily life becomes daily life again, even as I take note of the occasional sidelong glance between them, which looks to me like a “Wow. Yes. Married.” moment. Aside from that, things are as familiar as toast.

This is the fun part; I know that now. Being the mother of the bride is merely the prologue to the story I really want to hear. Chapter after chapter, unfolding for years to come — the story of my daughter, Sarah, who loves Jesse, who loves her back.