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Illustration by Alex Siklos
My 17-year-old emerges butt-first from the dressing room, asking me to tighten the laces on her corset. The dress is dark seafoam, strapless and sparkly, with ombré poufs of darker, layered chiffon that trails on the floor.
In and out of the change room, my daughter is light years away from her regular uniform of jeans, hoodies and Air Force One sneakers. If dresses have names, this one is an obvious Love Boat. I keep my face blank, yet encouraging, careful to read her reaction before saying what I think even as the show’s schmaltzy theme song cues in my head.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a mother of a teenage girl, it’s the value of staying mum. On the hanger, this dress was about as close to the stretchy, sparkly Little Mermaid outfit she wore to school when she was four. But today, my daughter isn’t playing a game or pretending to be grown-up. She is showing me what she has become.
My daughter is taking this job of finding a dress as seriously as a calculus exam. I picture the wheels in her head cranking away as she scrutinizes neckline and hemline, evaluating the quantity of lace and quality of fabric. Beyond mother-daughter politics, the second part of keeping my thoughts to myself is to retain this delicate façade of calm, which is one push-up bustier away from collapse. With every new dress reveal, I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth, clutch the box of Kleenex on my lap, and pray for the strength to keep it together.
The curtain opens again and I want to burst into applause. This black strapless gown has a sweetheart neckline that cinches at the waist with a black satin ribbon over a floor-length flume of lightly-layered gauze. It is classic and exquisitely feminine. In this classic and exquisitely feminine dress, my door-slamming teen, who leaves piles of mouldy water bottles and dirty underwear on her bedroom floor, is transformed into calm, cool sophisticate. The dress commands a certain posture, and my daughter obeys. Forget The Love Boat. This is more, “Prepare the yacht.” I hide behind my phone and take 300 photos. This dress costs around triple this month’s rent.
“Too fancy,” she declares, after admiring herself thoroughly.
“Thank God,” I say silently.
She appears again, this time in a pale pink sheath that takes my breath right out of my lungs. She angles herself to the mirror for a glimpse of her backside with the smallest of satisfied smiles. She knows exactly who she is looking at, and it’s so obvious that the girl in the mirror is someone she really likes. This dress is the killer, the one I’ll forever hold responsible for stealing the last fumes of my daughter’s childhood that swirl briefly overhead.
Just as I’ve decided to renegotiate the mortgage, she saves me the trouble. “I love it, but the price is ridiculous,” before going on about how we’d better move on if we really want to find something today.
Our family’s secularism has excluded us from communions and confirmations, bull jumping and bat mitzvahs. If we were from Latin America, we would have celebrated her quinceanera two years earlier, right in the middle of her physical blooming and synaptic pruning and general violent reordering, corpus callosum. Fancy words for 10,000 eye rolls and three years of extremely snappy backtalk. Hardly the time I’d choose to honour her with a huge party.
The change room has become a porthole to Narnia, a magical wardrobe for metamorphosis with a steep learning curve. And the learning curve isn’t for her, it’s for me, because with every dress, I catch up a little more to where she’s been for a while – a place I was unable, or unwilling, to see. My lovable, prickly, youthful caterpillar contains a woman. Seventeen might be late compared to traditional ceremonies, but it’s the right time for us.
We both know the dress is “the one” even before I’ve finished lacing her up. A side-peaked structured bustier with a straight skirt to the ankles and a long slit up the back. Deep burgundy, lightly brocaded with a matching lace overlay. The dress is straightforward with classic lines. Just like my girl. Her dark features warmly complimented by the richness of the red. It fits as if it were made for her. She will wear her long, chestnut hair down in a loose wave. This dress doesn’t cue any theme songs and doesn’t need a clever name. It is simply The One.
The dress is special enough to hold all those missed rituals together. Maybe even more for me than for her.
Joanna Baxter lives in West Vancouver.
