Allowing it to proceed would have meant paying a cost that nobody asked me if I was willing to pay. Not just the dress. Not just the labor. The cost of being the kind of person in my family who is treated as less mine than Elise is Elise’s. The cost of a mother who translates ‘looking at it for inspiration’ into ‘available for use’ because that is more convenient.
I’m also not going to pretend there wasn’t a part of me that simply wanted the dress back because it was mine and I had made it and the idea of Elise wearing it on her wedding day — even if all of this had been handled entirely correctly, even if she had asked and I had said yes — would have been strange for me. Not wrong, if done right. But strange. The dress holds something of my wedding in it. It is, among other things, a memory object. The idea of it being someone else’s wedding memory is complicated in a way I don’t fully have words for.
I don’t think I would have said yes, even asked. I want to be honest about that.
## Elise’s History of Not Asking
Something Elise and I talked about, in a later conversation that felt more like the real one than the coffee shop one, was her history of not asking me directly for things.
She has always gone through our mother. When she was young this made some sense — she was younger, she was shy, and our mother was the intermediary the family structure provided. But it continued into adulthood in ways that I had noticed but not named clearly. When she wanted something from me, she would often mention it to our mother first, and then hear back from our mother what I’d supposedly said, and often the version she got was slightly different from what I’d actually said.