My mother-in-law told my seamstress to take my wedding dress up two inches just four days before the wedding. Nobody asked me. Nobody checked with me. The dress had already been fitted three times over seven months, and at five-foot-ten, those two inches made a huge difference. When I put it on that day, it looked like it belonged to someone much shorter, and I felt uncomfortable every second I wore it.
At the reception, my mother-in-law squeezed my arm and told me I looked lovely. Then she smiled and said that hems were difficult to get right. I let it go. That’s what you do sometimes when you’re trying to survive a wedding without creating another family argument. I told myself there would be thirty years of Christmases ahead and that fighting over a dress wasn’t worth becoming “the difficult one.”
Eight months later, my seamstress mailed me the alteration ticket along with a short note. She had also saved the voicemail from the person who called and ordered the change. I sat in my car in a parking lot and listened to it once. Then I laughed out loud because suddenly the whole thing made sense.
I drove straight to my husband’s office, put my phone on his desk, and pressed play. When the voicemail ended, he didn’t defend his mother or make an excuse. He just stared at the phone and asked me to play it again. Because my mother-in-law hadn’t called the seamstress to fix my dress at all — she’d specifically told her to make one particular alteration, and the reason she gave was something my husband had never heard before…
