How To Buy A Mother of Groom Dress: (I Am An Oracle: Build Me A Cave PART I)

Before I went dress shopping for a Mom O’ Groom dress and before Mother’s Day, I wrote predictive posts about both occasions.

I was largely correct in a generalized way – but I was spot-on precise about dress shopping. So accurate, it seems I exist within a fabric of space-time about which theoretical physicists only hypothesize:  a ‘foam’ which conjoins the world we see with one we cannot.  

I am an oracle. Build me a cave with hallucinogenic vapors. 

Or cordon off a spot in my basement by the cat box. 

As expected, I returned from the Hunter Gatherer Dress Safari disoriented and swatting at things that weren’t there, but in my hand was a giant Lord and Taylor bag containing between seven and fifteen dresses, perhaps more, plus others I ordered in-store.  All in addition to the dress I'd ordered in February that allows people from as far away as Jupiter to visualize special Jabba-The-Hut effects that four run-ins with childbirth and 54 years of gravitational pull have exacted.

And I need all eleven dresses. 

I have no idea what mood I’ll be in this far in advance of my son’s wedding, in 31 days. Each separate  style, hue, fabric and length provides options. 

If – God forbid – it is cloudy, I will go with a color and fabric that complements a storm. The same with ornamental dogwood blossoms should the ceremony take place outdoors, and Big Bird should he make an appearance.  There isn’t a climate-based, celebrity intensive event that one of these dresses can’t accessorize.

And the shopping part?  SOOO fun and memorable. There are photographs of body parts once belonging to me that got symbiotically woven into back straps and satin liners.  

Once, I was entombed in silk like an ex-pharaoh  – unable to move, quite like when I was six and had my tonsils out and two surgical nurses rolled me in a bedsheet with both arms locked at my sides so that, in this mummified position, I could not uppercut the anesthesiologist again (I had an issue with ‘masks’ over my face. Just like I have issues with 'gowns' over my face).

Inside the 'dressing room’ -- a cruel misnomer --  I wound my way into a different dress by feeding my arms into waist-gussets and passing my head through a wrist-hole. At one point a built-in bra strap coiled itself around my carotid artery and cut off brain circulation, so I had to head-butt the swinging door and lurch toward the opposing wall, which was when Emma and Abby and Alexa extricated me from rubberized hypoxia.  

I still have residue of a headache which I think is from a carotid blood-clot that broke loose and lodged itself in a piece of neural tissue I’m pretty sure I use to interpret my GPS.  Because I got lost this morning on my way home from a local gas station.

But I do have eleven mother of the groom dresses and I may wear all of them, because I am bringing staff:  two personal dressers and coif a expert who will assist me in seamless extractions and donnings, before, during and post-ceremony and its aftermath. 


 I shall move through multiple bedecking-phases like the inconstant moon. . .

 To be multiply-bedecked -- or not to be. 

 Is that even a question?

I Am An Oracle: Build Me A Cave PART II

Totally wrong was I, however, about Mother’s Day.  I built my kids a Vegan Legume Gas Dish (see post below, Lentil and Black Quinoa Salad: Pass the GasX and Happy Mother's Day) as a prize for  gathering not JUST to celebrate me, but the imminent sale of waterfront property we partially own and, therefore, must make room in our basement to take occupancy, real quick, of stuff the new owners don’t want that we don’t want either – but it has to get OUT of the residence.

I was SO excited to divest myself of decades of crap our four adult offspring purposefully left here to ‘store’ … that I forgot all four of them are connected to social media:  Facebook, Twitter, the Telephone, Each Other.  Meaning, news that the buyers backed out of the deal actually reached them.

THE Multi-Colored Roses

Cleaning the basement was not to be. 

They arrived at high noon with a breathtaking array of multi-colored roses and cards and hearty pirate appetites and several favorite board games, infragrant cigars and less fragrant internet links to hour-long boxing matches between Ali and Frasier and video of Mike Tyson Knockout Highlights set to music – all of which we enjoyed together on Mother’s Day … instead of removing from my basement amplifiers the size of a Kia Sportage and chunks of actual ex-vehicles and furniture pieces so horrifying, even our pets avoid them because, frankly, I believe they are haunted. They have lived in so many dwellings over the centuries, they have seen . . . a lot.

I never could have predicted our day would involve boxing and cigars, not even if I lived inside a cave with hallucinogenic vapors – which, I DO, given the Hazmat stain and urethane byproducts languishing as I write this in my basement, next to gym equipment abandoned by our kids so long ago that sheer neglect caused one weight lifting apparatus to star as the centerpiece in what my husband defacto claimed as a man cave.

But neither could I have predicted the beauty of the multi colored roses with which they bedazzled me upon their loud arrival.  It has long been my secret desire to receive a bouquet of multi-colored roses!

Oh, I have received roses. Last Mother’s Day our Canadian Son Nicholas sent me TWO dozen long stemmed red roses, along with a carefully-selected excerpt from author Ellen Key, “At every step, the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.” 

A thing of beauty and joyous memory forever.

Until the multi-colored version arrived with the American children on Sunday. 

Once my Rose-Of-Many-Colors-Wish came true on Sunday, I felt like Dolly Parton with her coat -- or a child with tragic illness en route to Space Camp, which reminds me: I need to schedule a colonoscopy. And THAT brings us to the Basement Evacuation Project we were to embark upon on Mother’s Day. The event for which I made Vegan Lentil /Quinoa Salad as a reward.

Having discovered there was to be no sale of the waterfront family property, my children made other plans, starting with distracting me with multi-colored roses.  

And a multi-purpose greeting card.

My son Zachary is famous for acquiring greeting cards unrelated to the holiday being celebrated. Last Easter he bought everyone Hanukkah cards decorated with dreidels and latkes and honey puffs. He brought Passover cards for Christmas.  This was his Judaic phase.  

Last year's Mother's Day card was filled with the rich heritage of Africa.  "Mama," it began.  "When I was little I thought a mama was someone who could always make everything all better. Someone who could kiss the hurt right out of a fall and turn a serious pout into a giggle." 

There was a rendering of a beautiful African American woman, her hands clasped together in loving delight.

The inside goes on, "Now that I'm older, I realize there are some things even a mama can't fix, but that you'll always do your best and . . . " etc. etc.   

It was similar to the 'Do Your Best' pep talks I'd given to our state's most disabled youth at a site for the post-adjudicated. 

But the best part -- as I read it aloud in front of available family who still live in this country -- was the Mother’s Day ending at the bottom. 

“I love you, Mama.  Happy Birthday.”

And seeing the look on Zach's face.  

Even HE had not intentionally purchased a Mother's Day greeting card that technically celebrated my birthday.

This year, for Mother's Day Chore-Sunday, he outdid himself. "You're Like a Mother to Me." 

Receiving a display of roses in every hue known to nature totally made up for the Clearinghouse Chores we did not get to and the cigars we smoked and the boxing matches we watched on Youtube.  And a greeting card noting I was "like a Mother" to him. 

We even ended our blue-sky perfect day by playing the board game, Carcassone, which relies on rudimentary knowledge of geometry, on remembering rules and not losing your game pieces or forgetting which color your game pieces are – none of which I can personally do – but it always seems to bring my offspring joy when they can re-teach me, year after relentless year.  I apparently always select the color ‘green’ for my game pieces, my PIG cannot run a religious cloister and a round castle-style ‘edge’ cannot line up with a body of water or … a goat… to complete a puzzle piece to claim territory and garner 'points.'

Anyway, it was not the Mother’s Day I had planned, but it was the Mother’s Day we all enjoyed and I, no really, would not have changed a thing. 

Next up?  

Memorial Day where I am sure to open the greeting card, “Congratulations on your bris” and we can play Settlers of Catan Deluxe Expansion Pack and smoke stogies made of rolled bat droppings and watch video of wild boars eviscerating pygmies, set to the musical stylings of Nine Inch Nails.

Shalom.