I’ve had to sit with the fact that this was, in some ways, about what Elise wanted badly enough to not look too closely at how she was getting it. The dress is beautiful. She had already imagined herself in it. She found a way to believe the thing that let her keep moving forward.
I understand that. I don’t excuse it. And I needed to be honest with myself about which was which — understanding versus excusing — before I could actually move forward with her.
## Where Things Stand Now
The wedding was in late June. I went.
Not because I had achieved some complete resolution with my mother, or because everything felt fully repaired. I went because Elise is my sister, and because not going would have been its own kind of statement that I didn’t actually want to make. What happened doesn’t define the whole of our relationship, and attending her wedding didn’t mean I’d forgotten it.
She wore the dress she’d found. It looked lovely. She looked happy in it. Noah looked slightly overwhelmed in the way that people sometimes look at their own weddings, where the enormity of the thing they’re doing briefly outpaces their ability to receive it.
I sat with my mother during part of the reception. We didn’t talk about the dress. We talked about other things — her garden, my work, some family news. It was slightly stilted in the way that conversations are when you’ve recently said important true things to each other and haven’t quite found your way back to the ordinary register yet.