The Loveliest of Days

This post must be prefaced by a caveat: I have loved being the mother of all boys.

The 15-year-old me would not have believed this statement. Oh, how I wanted baby girls! I wanted to dress them in frilly diaper covers and Scotch-tape oversized bows onto their bald little heads. I wanted to teach them to make pie crust and appreciate brainy boys. What was I going to do with sons?

God laughed, and here I am several decades later, having absolutely loved being the queen bee.

Occasionally, though, I still gave a little sigh of nostalgia at the thought of my phantom daughters whose hair I've never French-braided (probably the reason I have only boys; God also knew the extent of my hair-impaired-ness) and whose newborn babies I will not be the first to bless. When I thought of my sons' future weddings I remembered wistfully how my own mother had altered the dress in which she was married so that I could have my dream-come-true wedding day. This relationship, I knew, was something not meant for the mothers of all boys

And then Lovely Girl entered our world on Boy#1's arm and heart.

Really, all she needed to do was love my son and I would have thought she was wonderful. But since they told us they would be getting married, she has brought me into the world of having a daughter, a world she could so easily have kept to herself and her mother. She invited me and my Much Older Sister to be part of the wedding dress shopping day, and I felt as if I had just been given the secret password to a wonderful sorority.

The shopping posse (the bride, the maid of honor, two mothers, two aunts) turned out to be wonderfully, raucously compatible as Lovely Girl tried on gown after gown. LG's beauty is vintage,with  porcelain skin and enormous eyes in a tiny  5'2" frame, so she knew her perfect dress probably wouldn't be easy to find, and the posse was ruthless.

"Mmmm, no," her aunt declared when the bride-to-be minced out in a strapless number so tight her bouncy walk was muted to a mincing hobble.

"And just what to you propose to carry on that tray under your chin?" someone said about a too-boned bodice.

Other dresses were okay, but they looked just like every other bare-shouldered bride on the society page.

But then, our Lovely Girl walked out of the dressing area beaming. I found myself with my hands clapped to my face, like the melodramatic girls in those Jumbotron proposals.

She stepped onto a tiny platform in front of angled mirrors and the fitter made a few final adjustments, straightening the train and twitching the veil over a shoulder. By now all of us were on our feet, wiping our eyes and making delighted sounds. We pointed at her tiny waist, and how the ivory shade brought out the beauty of her skin. We remarked on how this dress somehow looked like her.

"We have one more dress on the rack," the fitter pointed out. "Do you want to try it on?"

"I might as well--" Lovely Girl started to say, but then she looked in the mirror again, and a smile broke over her face. "No. This is it. This is the one."

And it occurred to me, again, how well Boy#1 had done in choosing a bride: He also chose my daughter-in-law, and she chose him.

This is it. This is the one.