My mother saw a dress. She saw silk and embroidery and a shape she thought would suit Elise. She did not see — or did not think it mattered — that the dress was also those nine months of evenings. That taking it without permission was also taking that.
This is not something I expect everyone to immediately understand. A lot of people in my life would look at a stored dress and see a dress. I don’t think my mother is a bad person for not automatically grasping the full dimension of what she was giving away. But I do think that when I told her I’d made it myself and what that had required — when Ben told her, when Rosa told her — there was a choice to understand and she chose not to fully make it. She chose the version of the story that let her keep giving Elise what Elise wanted.
## The Part I Had Trouble With
I want to be honest about something: for about three weeks after I got the dress back, I was angrier at Elise than at my mother.
This surprised me. My mother had done the worse thing, objectively. She’d told a false story, she’d facilitated damage to something I’d made, she’d asked me to use my own labor to complete the transformation. These are not small things.
But the anger at Elise was sharper, and I think I know why: I expected more from her. My mother has a pattern I’ve known about for years. She is who she is, and she does what she does, and I have accepted that even as I’ve pushed back on it. Elise is my sister, and I had assumed — without examining that assumption — that if my mother told her something that didn’t sound right, she would call me. She didn’t call me. She relied on our mother as her source of information about my consent when I was literally one text message away.