The Red Dress

In the nightly scheme of survival, my daughter arrives home from work and reads Tricia Williford's blog. This isn't a bad thing, Tricia is a fellow writer and her blog posts are more often than not relevant to our lives. Tricia's husband Robb passed away in her arms on December 23, 2010. She's feeling the ultimate form of abandonment, not that he abandoned her, as that implies he left her of his own will. He did not. He was taken from her, by death; stolen right out of her arms in the bedroom they shared.

Her posts are relevant in our lives because both my daughter and I are divorced, abandoned to be single mothers. Whether that was our wish or not, our goal in life or not, never mattered, the other half of our respective marriages, left. The abandonment in our lives is so complete and yet... so unending. Each moment we're alive, we know that we weren't loved "enough."

That feeling of lacking love, lacking sustenance and understanding, of missing that which we were promised comes full circle as she reads Tricia's blog each night. Occasionally, Tricia's posts cross that line of definition between widowed and divorce to touch the defiance that a woman feels when she's left without a mate.

Such is the case with her post about a red dress.

No only does she share her heart and the feelings she felt when Robb took her out on special dates and she prepared to meet him as his loving and graceful wife, who dolled herself up to look attractive to him, but she shares the part of her that says, "I need to feel loved, appreciated and cared for by one man."  Every woman desires that feeling.

I remember talking to my mother a short while after Dad left as she worked around the yard wearing an old tattered and worn out t-shirt and jeans. She didn't care that she wasn't dressed attractively. It mattered not one whit to her... because nobody appreciated her dressing up anymore. I remembered that feeling and my heart ached for her. Still today, I remember that feeling. I felt it as I read Tricia's post tonight about her desire to wear the red dress.

I too, desire to wear the red dress. But more than wearing the red dress... I want that feeling of love and appreciation that goes with wearing the red dress.

I often dress up, fix my hair and doll up in my pretty clothes, but as a single woman with teenaged children, twenty something daughters and grandchildren, I'm far more likely to hear, "Why are you trying to dress up today?" than I am to hear how pretty I am. Even on the professional front, as I dress for work... there's no one who offers up the compliments, the admiration, and the appreciation for the time I took "extra" to get all dolled up and looking pretty. And it wouldn't really matter if they did, because at the end of the day... nobody loves me enough to be there - every night.

Sad, but true.