I also still have the dated photos I took throughout the construction process. Not a formal documentation — I wasn’t thinking about documentation, I was making a dress — but periodic photos when something was finished or when I wanted to remember a stage. The first muslin, tried on in our bathroom with the mirror in the background. The silk laid out on my cutting table, weighted, ready to cut. The first sleeve cuff with the embroidery half-done, held up under the lamp. The completed dress on a hanger.
I mentioned these to my mother during one of our conversations after, not as a threat or a piece of evidence to deploy, but because she had said something vague about not knowing how long I’d really worked on it, and I wanted her to understand that the record existed. I had been making notes throughout. The nine months weren’t a story I was telling. They were documented.
She said, ‘I believe you, Mara. I’m not disputing the time.’ And I think she meant it. I think the time had never been the thing she was disputing. She just hadn’t allowed the time to be what it actually was — something that created an obligation she was unwilling to feel, because feeling it would have meant not giving Elise what Elise wanted.
## What Ben Said About Our Marriage
This is something I want to include because it matters to the story even though it isn’t the main story: the thing that happened with the dress put a kind of pressure on Ben and me that we hadn’t experienced before, and we passed through it, and that matters.