Recognize Yourself Again.
My daughter sent me a photo of the two of us from her wedding last June and I had to ask her who the older woman standing next to her was. I want you to understand that I was being completely serious. I sat at my kitchen counter in my robe at 7:14 in the morning, looking at the photograph she had texted me at 6:53, and I could not place the woman in the dusty rose mother-of-the-bride dress. I knew the dress. I had bought it at a boutique in downtown Greenville eleven months earlier. I had been to three fittings. I had stood in front of that boutique mirror in February and decided that the rose color made me look softer, kinder, more like a mother of a bride than the navy one had. But the woman wearing the dress in the photograph my daughter sent me was not the woman I remembered being. My name is Patricia. Most people call me Pat. I'm 56 years old. I live in Greenville, South Carolina, in a brick ranch on a quiet street near a park where the dogwoods come in white in April. I work part time as a paralegal for a small estate planning firm downtown. I have two children — my son Cole who is 29 and lives in Atlanta, and my daughter Mallory who got married in June and lives in Charlotte with her husband, a software engineer named Drew. I sat at my counter looking at that photograph for a long time. I want to tell you exactly what I was looking at, because I think it matters. The woman in the dress had a face that did not match my idea of my own face. Her cheeks were full down to her jaw in a continuous line that did not have the contour I remembered. Her eyes looked smaller than my eyes — not because of wrinkles, just because the skin around them looked thicker. The dress that I had stood in three different fitting rooms thinking flattered me actually pulled across her midsection in a way that suggested the dress had been the wrong size, or that the woman wearing it had changed shape between the third fitting and the wedding day. She was holding Mallory's han
