Weddingbee Blog

You might be asking yourself, “Miss Wizard, why the heck were you so hell-bent on going dress shopping just days after getting engaged?” They always say to wait to go dress shopping until you have a better idea of what your venue will be, how formal your wedding is, what season it will be, and so on. And I agree with that in theory. In practice? Sometimes life gets in the way and you have to jump at the chance to dress shop whenever it presents itself.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: my mom died when I was a baby. Four months old, to be exact. She and my dad had taken me to my four-month checkup at the pediatrician’s office, and as they were checking out afterward, she quite literally collapsed on the spot. My dad caught baby-me out of her arms, and left me in the care of one of the nurses there while he rode to the hospital in the ambulance with my mom. I don’t know at what point during this whole saga her heart actually stopped, but I do know that when my dad came back to get me from the nurse, Mom wasn’t with him.

It was so sudden. She was never sick, always healthy, and took good care of herself. It turns out that she had a rare, incurable heart disease—myocardial fibrosis–w-hose only symptom is sudden death. Never having had any symptoms, she never went to a doctor, or a cardiologist, or anything, to get looked at; if she had just had an EKG, a chest X-ray, or something, a doctor might have seen it and been able to give her a pacemaker and she might still be here. But by the time the only symptom—death—presented itself, it was already too late.

And so I’ve grown up without a mom. My whole life I’ve been told how alike we are, both in looks and in personality, how much I would have loved her, how proud she would have been of me. It’s always been hard to hear all of these things and know that I’ll never be able to have a conversation with her, listen to a Billy Joel record with her, call her up to ask how to do this crochet stitch I’m having trouble with, go home to eat her cooking at the holidays, or any of the other normal mother-daughter things.

Personal photo / One of my favorite pictures of my mama

I sometimes feel as though my life will never truly be complete because I’ll never meet this amazing woman that I almost had a chance to know. But I love the life I have, and that is in no small part thanks to the other amazing women in my life. Wizard Grandma and Wizard Aunt—my mom’s mom and sister—are the closest things I have to my mom. They live out of town, one in New England and one in the South, both about eight or nine hours away from me. So when I heard they were both coming in for my graduation, I knew we had to go wedding-dress shopping that weekend. When else would we have that opportunity? This was another reason why I was so determined to be engaged by graduation—without an engagement, we couldn’t go dress shopping, and after that weekend I didn’t know if we’d ever be able to go all together again.

But Wizard Grandma and Wizard Aunt aren’t my only “moms.” You know that expression “It takes a village”? I have a whole village of women from all different walks of life who are “moms” to me in one way or another. And I wanted them all to be there when I tried on wedding dresses. And that is how I became one of those girls with an “entourage” with me on dress-shopping day. (Even though my BFF Randy says that’s a big no-no. Sorry, Randy.)

Sorry, bestie. I broke your cardinal rule. / Image via Poptower

I knew it would be a little ridiculous. I knew it would make the day more stressful. But I couldn’t do it any other way—I wanted them all there, each and every single one. Nine of them, to be exact. Because yes, they all mean that much to me.

Are you planning your wedding without an important person in your life? Did you have a lot of people you wanted to come dress shopping with you?