Mothers and Dresses

 

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

MOTHERS AND DRESSES

The other day when I was shopping online, I accidentally ended up on a page full of dresses.

Alongside the dresses were ads showing mothers and daughters celebrating Mother’s Day together. Now I wouldn’t buy my mom a dress; she prefers books. However, my mind easily took the mom-dress connection and ran with it because so many of my early memories of clothing, especially dresses, include my mother and grandmother.

Grandma loved sewing for me. My school pictures from kindergarten to third grade all have me wearing dresses or jumpers with blouses that Grandma made. In my school photos from fourth grade and later, I was wearing store-bought blouses. I’m pretty sure my grandmother had given up on me by then, had considered me a lost cause in the dress department.

As a tomboy who climbed trees and rode bikes and played in the mud, I preferred pants, even at an early age. In fact, in kindergarten a male classmate asked me “Why do you dress like a boy?”

Well, any girl who has ever climbed on a jungle gym while wearing a dress knows the answer to that one. I learned early on that dresses limited my ability to do what I wanted to do. Pants are a lot easier on the legs than dresses when sliding down the metal slippery slide. And it’s hard to be lady-like in a dress while hanging from the monkey bar rungs. I was never able to get clear across the monkey bars, but I got plenty of blisters trying.

Pants were just more practical than dresses. They have pockets. You don’t have to be so careful about sitting positions. And with slacks, you don’t have to worry about strong gusts of wind. (“Dress up day” is what we call a windy day in Kansas.)

During the ‘60s, girls in Pawnee Rock grade school were allowed to wear pants. The fun ended, however, when we crossed the line into junior high where dresses were a requirement. I worried about that for years, but I lucked out – the dress code was relaxed before I got to seventh grade.

Wearing slacks to church, however, was never an option. And every spring, Mom made an Easter dress for me. Part of the annual ritual was to visit a fabric store, usually Grace’s Fabrics on the courthouse square in Great Bend. There, we’d turn the pages of the pattern catalogs together to choose a dress and then pick out the material. One of my favorite Easter dresses was a lime green A-line dress made of polyester knit with colorful appliquéd flowers tacked onto the dress’s vertical front seams.

Now my grandma, she was old-school when it came to apparel. She only wore dresses, ones she had sewn herself. Her one and only complaint about me was my fondness for pants. “You look so cute in dresses. I wish you’d wear them once in awhile,” she’d say when we visited her in Arkansas.

I wore a dress every Sunday. Wasn’t that enough?

By 1976, Grandma had moved to Kansas and was living in her childhood hometown of Kinsley. Somewhere along the line, Mom had talked Grandma into buying herself a pair of slacks. One day when we picked Grandma up to go shopping in Dodge City, Grandma wore her new pantsuit. As soon as we returned to her apartment, Grandma changed back into her dress. “Now I’m comfortable,” she said, her voice filled with relief.

Actually, I did wear dresses and skirts once in awhile. I wasn’t going to miss out on the mini-skirt rage in the late ‘60s. Mrs. Fry, our fourth grade teacher, held girls to the dress code: skirt hems could not be more than four inches above the knee. We liked to push the limit, and when there was question of length Mrs. Fry had us kneel on the classroom floor and she got out her ruler.

My mother doesn’t care what I wear and Grandma’s not around anymore to try to wrestle me into a dress, so if you see me out in the world these days, you’ll likely find me wearing jeans or slacks. I haven’t climbed a jungle gym since 2008 when I found one at the closed elementary school in Carlton, but if I come across another one, I want to be ready.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh