Pushing Thirtyy

Girls and their Dresses

work it girl! (PS this is NOT me. I was a child of the 80s. We were not this fashionable)

I was never one of those little girls who dreamed up every detail of her wedding day.  But I was one of those girls who loved to get dressed up.  During Bar & Bat Mitzvah season, I had a chance to dress up a lot.  I must have been to something like 30-40 parties.  If it were up to me, I would have worn a new dress every time — and as it was, I did have a ton of dresses.

Come high school, we didn’t have a lot of dances, and I didn’t go to a lot of sweet sixteens, so opportunities were a little more rare (my dressing up, in effect changed to night club attire).  Sure, I went to a few proms, but other than that, all I had was my senior prom.  My dress was me to a tee.  A long red dress with a leopard print lining on top (see picture here).  I still remember the moment that I saw it, and laughed at the irony of finding a piece of clothing so unique that there was no way anyone else would have it.

That would have been a nightmare! To show up in the same dress as someone else!  God forbid you laugh it off and make light of the situation — hey, you both have good taste.  No, girls are more often caddy before comrades.  But I digress.

Your wedding dress is by far the most important dress a girl will ever wear in her life.  Some may not take this decision so seriously, since you only wear it one day.  But it is a very important day.  I didn’t need to (or want to) spend too much on it, but I knew that I needed to feel like the most beautiful girl in the world in my dress.

It’s not every day you try on wedding dresses, and once you do, it’s unlike any other fitting experience you will ever have.  It’s hard to transform your mind into looking at yourself as a bride.  And I was told so many times that — much like true love — you know when you have found the one the moment you see yourself in it.

So I did research, and I started to do some shopping.  I started to figure out what I really liked.  I know myself style-wise and I knew I needed something unique, something that made me shine.  It took shopping at three different bridal shops until I found the one, and the feeling is overwhelming and nerve-wrecking.  It was almost hard to get through that emotion to know it was the one.

But I did, and I haven’t yet come down from this overwhelming feeling — the excitement, the nerves, all of it.  But I found it, and maybe the planning will get easier from here on out, because I won’t have to show up on my wedding day naked.