“True
beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul.” - Audrey Hepburn
I wanted to be beautiful on
my wedding day. The way Princess Kate was beautiful in her Alexander
McQueen gown, standing on the steps of Westminster Abbey, or the way
Cinderella was beautiful in her 1950's animated
dress with timeless appeal and innocent charm. I wanted people to
call me Audrey Hepburn and Jennifer Lawrence and Shirley Temple;
classic, bold, and naive. I wanted enough cleavage to be an adult and
yet be covered enough to save my virgin skin for the wedding night. Like
the old adage says:
“Your
dress should be tight enough to show you're a woman and loose enough
to prove you're a lady.”
I got
sick the week of my wedding, puking and crying and dehydrating my stressed system. I was banned from helping, banned
from partying, and banned from human interaction, so I lay in bed and
planned every moment. I planned the hugs, the vows, and the reception. I
wondered if he was going to cry when I walked down the aisle.
But
mostly I thought about my wedding dress. Today the wedding dress has
become the most important piece of the wedding day, and I fell prey
to every lie culture fed me. I believed the horror stories of never finding "the one," and it
took us weeks, multiple stores and a meltdown in David's Bridal
dressing room.
But I
wanted to be beautiful on my wedding day. And I would settle for
nothing less than the perfection raised up in my mind from years of
planning. Every girl's goal is to be a princess, be a star, be a
Cinderella. The aisles to our spouse became a red carpet and our
photographers the paparazzi. The vows are well-rehearsed lines
which we re-read with mock emotion, and we spend the most precious
moments of our lives worried sick that we will trip over the aisle
runner in front of a judgmental audience.
I
finally settled on a strapless, lace, clearance-rack gown with a
satin sash and a double, knee-length veil. It was simple, pure and
peaceful, and yet when I unzipped the bag at home, the fears of
finding the perfect dress transferred into the fears of being the
perfect body to wear it. Through the last year of my life journey, I
had moved away from home and abandoned the healthy eating habits from
the first 20 years of my life and met up with my metabolism for the first
time. A month-long national tour, ice-cream, a long-distance
relationship, counseling and a lot of chocolate later, I owned a
belly. A belly that told me that I had been living in the world and
not in a gym: and yet my body could not lie flat under white lace.
It
pudged out a little bit.
After alterations, I
sat on my bed and obsessed over the knowledge that I wasn't a
Victoria Secret model and once again lost sight of the truth that my
husband was marrying me and not my body. He had fallen in love with
my character, my mind, my heart, and not my weight or face or my
jeans from high-school which didn't fit perfectly anymore.
I
wanted to be beautiful on my wedding day, and so I began a diet the
month I got engaged to change what I was. I told others it was
because I longed to be healthy and enter the stressful wedding season
with nutrition and energy, but that was also a lie. I wanted to be an
Instagram photo. Leggings and form-fitting shirts and a four-pack. I
stopped having fun on ice-cream dates with my fiance and I denied
myself the chocolate chip cookie on my birthday knowing that 250
people would be watching my every move and the lens of a camera would
be capturing every angle for all my children to see hanging on our
dinging room wall someday.
Except,
when that photo is framed above family dinners, I want my children to
see a woman who was beautiful on her wedding day because her husband
called her a Princess and she believed it. A woman who didn't tug at
her bodice so much and danced a little bit more, who knew that if she
ate at her reception it wouldn't ruin the rest of her wedding day. I
want those precious little hearts to look up and know their mama went
through life, enjoyed life, and stopped caring if she wore size 00
and chose to not cry over a size 2 in a dressing room because she
knew, long after her wedding day, her body would change with every
new move, every new pregnancy, every new crisis, and and size 2 would be
a distant dream long before she realized she was even changing.
I
wanted to be beautiful on my wedding day, and I chose to lose sight
of the undeniable truth that I am beautiful because I am a woman.
Fully female, fully flawed, and fully complete, I am beautiful. In the eyes of
myself, staring in the mirror on a day when my acne flares up, my
muffin-top seems gigantic and my legs aren't shaved, I am beautiful.
We
are beautiful on busy days when we don't have time to put on our
makeup. We are beautiful on nights when we're puking over a dirty
toilet and don't understand what we did to deserve food poisoning. We
are beautiful when bikini season hits and we have cellulite and
stretch marks and we haven't ever been pregnant and don't know where
the stretch marks came from. We are beautiful on Sundays and we are beautiful on Mondays and we are beautiful when that reality seems stolen from us and we cannot see the truth.
I was beautiful on my wedding day. If only I had seen it.
