I don’t think about it constantly. I don’t go and look at the cuff every week. It exists in the box, and occasionally I open the box, and when I look at the right cuff I see what I made and then what happened and then what I did in response. Three different things in a continuous object.
Some months ago, at a family dinner that included everyone — my parents, Elise and Noah, Ben and me, my aunt Susan — my mother mentioned the dress, offhandedly, in the context of something else. She said something like, ‘Mara made the most extraordinary wedding dress for herself.’ Past tense. Present ownership. The wording was slightly different from how she had referred to it before. As though she was now being careful to say whose it was.
I noticed. I didn’t say anything. I thought: okay.
## On Making Things
I want to end with something that is not about the conflict.
I have been making things for as long as I can remember. Not always garments — other things too, when I was younger. Clay things, paper things. Things that didn’t turn out and things that did. I drifted toward fabric and construction because I found the problem-solving satisfying: you start with a flat thing and you make it three-dimensional, and the principles that govern how you do that are real and specific and learnable, and learning them produces results you can see and touch.
The dress is the most complicated thing I have made. It may remain so for a long time. Not because I couldn’t make something more complicated, technically — I probably could — but because the conditions that produced it were specific. Nine months of evenings in an apartment where I was otherwise occupied with work and life and a new engagement. A fabric I had saved for two years. An embroidery practice I had been developing since I was twenty-five. A design I had been imagining since before I knew who I was going to marry. All of that in one object.