Fell in the shower
Giant red welt on my thigh
isn’t purple yet.

He brings me coffee in bed before leaving the house. It is Saturday morning and he has let me sleep in until his friend is on the doorstep, ready to go. “Hannah’s downstairs watching a movie, so I think you have some time before you have to get up,” He says.

I swim toward consciousness through damp, noisy thoughts. The roaring static in my head becomes the hard rain on the roof as grey unconsciousness resolves to cloud-soaked light.

I still feel sick, but I’m determined not to whine. I have already given myself the talk about the break he deserves.

“Hey, don’t feel that if you don’t fish you have to come home. Maybe you’d like to go for a drink instead.” He is mostly out the bedroom door.

“Hah! At 9 am?” He is as guarded against taking breaks as I am and his defense is to mock me.

“Or maybe you want to go to a movie?”

He is noncommittal. And gone.

* * *

I push myself out of bed on determination. I have done this before. Remember? Have actually spent weekend after weekend alone with a two-year old plus five-year-old-Ethan.  I was a single parent once and I managed to keep our three ragged-raft lives afloat. Even when I got sick.

Don’t you dare treat this like a hardship when for many this is routine, I warn myself. My determination and I have made a list: there is a pile of laundry in the livingroom to be folded, groceries to be fetched and Rachel’s birthday will be celebrated on Sunday so the house must be cleaned, at least enough to entertain.

I drink my coffee and clean the kitchen. Fold laundry. Chide myself for inappropriate self-satisfaction. Some people clean often enough that they can’t delude themselves into feeling virtuous for it, I remind myself.

I am running out of pep and so I turn my attention to wrestling Hannah into an outing. I out-stubborn her into a raincoat, run around grabbing everything we need and hustle us out the door. With rain in her face, Hannah’s stingy willingness turns cold. “I need up,” she demands and hides from the rain with her face in my neck. I carry her to Broadway, make three stops increasingly laden with things to carry, and return home fretting my precarious hold on a box of baking, balance it against the arm that also balances a toddler.

My arms are shaking with fatigue and my come-and-go breathing pain is back in my chest, but I can’t make myself set her down. The comfort of two-year-old arms wrapped around my neck and a warm body to carry is infinitely preferable to a slow cold walk, coaxing and chiding all the way.

* * *

On Monday, I take Hannah in to work to explain to my coworkers that, with no daycare, I will be at home for the week.

I put Hannah at my desk with crayons and paper. Reschedule meetings. My Wednesday meeting with Firefly will have to wait weeks - she is leaving for a week and a half of trips this Friday. She lists the causes - three back-to-back business meetings and conferences in various cities - and I mime wiping sympathy sweat off my brow.

I was thinking about that, she tells me. This is actually no big deal. Remember at our first job together? Being gone for a week was routine. We did that twice a month.

Now I am really sweating. I remember.

We touch the conversation to some significant cities we have been to, long trips we endured. I was a single-parent and I managed to keep three lives afloat.

Our conversations often come around to this. It was a time that shaped both of us. And though we are very different people, have very different backgrounds, we have been through the same forge. Sometimes, I think, we are like retired military officers, trading big stories for the benefit of others. Behind the big stories, I am quietly touching my dog-tags, acknowledging what cannot be told in words.

* * *

Today a ragamuffin Broadway-kid in bright colours and pale dreads flashed a peace sign at Hannah as we walked out of the local grocery store. He and his Broadway-kid girlfriend were sitting on the curb of the parking lot, doing whatever it is east-side ragamuffins do. Some elaborate form of nothing, I guessed, having never been an east-side ragamuffin, myself.

Hannah looked sideways at him and scooted after me. I love the toddler-walk. Her short legs, her little trot.

“Are you going to give him a peace sign back?” I asked her, knowing the answer. Lately, when strangers smile at her or speak to her, she comes close to me to whisper in my ear, “mum, I’m shy of all these people.”

I smiled at them as we departed. And they smiled and nodded back.

I have friends who try to be very cosmopolitan who like to say that for all its city-ness, Saskatoon is still a small town. They say it derisively, to distinguish themselves as someone who knows the difference. I think of the cities I have seen, how I measured each against Saskatoon and I feel that difference acutely. And comfortably.

* * *

I have been planning for writing again. I have been turning over my characters. I stopped writing my book when it came time to introduce my villain. Because he was supposed to be charming, but dangerous, and I didn’t have the experience to convey it.

What does it mean to be charming?

* * *

At that old job, I had a boss who was charming and a supervisor who was villainous.

My boss was affable, genial, conversational. He asked your opinions. He listened as if they mattered. No idea was dismissed before he had asked questions and explored it.

My supervisor enjoyed intimidation. He swore, lectured and insulted me. He impugned my sales performance and threatened to make me travel full-time if I didn’t sell more. He knew that would require me to essentially give up custody of my children.

I’d come from a string of one-sided, sometimes abusive relationships. Though I was newly single, I’d been well-trained in passiveness and for two years, I’d rolled over for him every time he came at me. I think that like an abusive husband, he’d reached the point of pushing and baiting for no more purpose than a cold fascination with the sport of seeing how much I would tolerate.

But I was newly single and I had learned to leave.

When it came time to give my notice to my charming boss, I choked and cried.

Now I wonder why I gave him that much. I confused charm for morality. Like the other side of the abusive husband, he charmed me to compensate for the abuse, but he never stopped it.

* * *

I have been reading accounts of battered women. “He poured boiling water on her face.” “He ordered her to kill her lover.”

Driving home down twelfth street, I turned that horror over in my head. How an abuser could induce someone to kill the only person who offered her a hope of escape. The horror of abuse in relationships is not precisely in what the abuser does to the abused, it is in the effect it has on the abused. Who it makes her. What it makes her capable of.

I don’t doubt for a second the capacity of every one of us to do unspeakable things, given the right abuses, the right circumstances.

* * *

So they went and stood out in the rain for a couple of hours not getting a nibble, Ian calls to tell me, and they decided they should go see a movie instead. But his friend said, “if I go to a movie, I should really go home and get my kids.” And Ian said, “why don’t I get my older kids.”

So after a leisurely lunch, Ian will come home to get the kids for a movie. But first I must coax Hannah out again to pick them up from their father’s house.

Hannah nods off on the drive. The older ones converse with me in undertones.

With everyone else fed lunch and bustled off to a movie, Hannah refuses to continue her nap at home, instead slouching into the armchair to watch Cars.

At 4 o’clock I am suddenly so, so, so tired. Exhausted enough that as I move around the house, trying to clean or at least settle on what I’m doing, I shamefully give serious thought to summoning Ian home. Don’t be foolish.

Then he’d have to drag two kids away from a movie. A movie that he probably just paid $50 to get into. Surely he’s turned his phone off anyway.

I have gravitated to the back of the house to avoid the drone of the movie. Faded old Jerk-Makes-Good trope.

Hollywood thinks everything is resolved when the self-interested jerk admits that he needs you. I have too much experience in the failure of those epiphanies to actually resolve anything.

With my head pounding, I sit down on the floor at the back of the house, and then stretch out on the floor, and then doze off.

I wash up on gravelly consciousness. Hannah is calling, “hey mommmmmy, where arrrrre you?” from the front of the house. “I’m here, Hannah,” I croak so she can follow my voice.

She is running through the house, toddling steps on chubby legs. “Hey I need some water.”

I push myself off the floor. Make it to the kitchen to find her most-recent half-drunk glass. And then I sit down and fall back asleep on the kitchen floor.

Asleep again. My eyes won’t open. There is only sound and movement. Hannah-sound. “Hey, you open your arm so I can lie down too.” Hannah-movement. A warm body pushing at my arm, pressing her little back into my side.

Darkness. Darkness. Then Hannah sitting on me and climbing over me, sliding down my shoulder to land on my neck. “Hannah that hurts,” I think I tell her. But I don’t know if she answers or stops. I am asleep again.

* * *

I am preparing to go on a trip for writing workshops with my aunt and my mother, to join my other aunt in Edmonton.

I stopped writing when it came time to write this charming villain, I tell my aunt. I didn’t know how to convey that.

It’s like Gavin De Becker says, she tells me. Charm is something you do intentionally. It isn’t a quality of the person.

Yes and it relates to the interest a person takes in you. Like when Meredith talks about how compelling mental illness can be. Someone who is mentally ill, when they are interested in you, they are so interested in you. And it’s elating. And when they tire of you it’s devastating.

And when they come back, it’s that same abusive cycle, my aunt says. It feels like falling in love.

I am stumblingly trying to explain how at ease I have become with  Ian, because we don’t do that, falling back in love. Though once I thought I wanted that. I am struck with memories of that sensation. Falling in love. Forceful and vivid. The manic upswing. Charmed. The relief from darkness and rejection. He will love me again. If I can only find how to sustain this. If I can only be the right way to keep him feeling this about me and not the other way.

It is not a good feeling.

What does it mean to be charming?

It’s the wrong question.

What does it mean to be charmed? I am an expert at that.

* * *

I had managed to get conscious enough to will myself into sitting up in the kitchen, but I hadn’t moved off the floor, by the time Ian and the kids got home after six.

There was no dramatic rescue. Just a certainty, that had always been there.

I went straight to the couch, curled up against him and went back to sleep.

So, as soon as I’d started talking myself into being fine with easing up on myself and focusing on getting as much rest as possible in order to improve my health, then the Thursday dance practice that usually goes from 6-9 instead went from 6-10:30. And then they informed us that they felt they had to add Monday night practices to the schedule since things are not coming along as well as they probably should.

Then, Friday night, Ian arranged a last minute fishing trip with a friend for today. I was pretty put out. We’ve been so, SO busy lately. It seems like every night is taken up with tasks, every weekend has has some giant thing on the to-do list or some special occasion requiring us to run around all weekend. Last weekend we didn’t have anything. We got up on Saturday and walked down to the farmer’s market, like we did a bunch last summer. And we stopped at the antique stores on broadway. And we spent the afternoon with all the kids at home, putzing around the house and drinking coffee. I thought, “oh my god. I need to spend my summer weekends like this. At least a few more weeks of this before we think of accomplishing anything more or shaking things up in any way.”

And then at the end of the weekend, Blue Milk had this post about contemporary family life. I remember thinking how it was full of interesting information and yet the only thing that was going to stick with me was her aside:

“we have spent almost every night together in the same house since having children and I have never missed him more!”

You know those statements that are so true for you that it affects you almost physically when you hear someone else unexpectedly articulate it. I spent the week turning that over in my head and thinking about the times when we have felt more connected, thinking now that my drumming lessons are over and this wedding planning is nearly over, we don’t have to pack so much into one week do we?

When he was organizing this outing, he kept stopping to say, “is this okay with you? I don’t want this to make you miserable.” But I could hardly tell him not to do it when I know he would do the same for me. In fact, is doing more for me next weekend while I leave for four nights for a writing workshop. And he always does so with more grace. And if there is anything that has suffered in the last six months more than our collective relaxation, it is probably his social life. So there’s that.

Yeah, and then while he was planning this outing, Hannah’s daycare owner called to pour her heart out about how on top of losing the lease on her current location and losing her main employee (which I knew) her son had been back in the hospital for the last two weeks after surgery on his back had left him with a spinal e. coli infection (which I didn’t know) and she had been at the hospital every day and was not prepared to make the transition to a new location and new employee on Monday and would I just understand if she wasn’t open next week.

Ugh. Ian and I were talking about it and he said, “I certainly have a lot of sympathy for her position. We’ll make it work.” And I said, “well, yeah. There really isn’t an option. What was I supposed to say? ‘Uh, no. That doesn’t work for me.’”

I’m not sure whether three days at home with Hannah will be more or less restful than going to work. On the one hand, I can get up at 7 instead of at 5. On the other hand, there is bound to be some amount of running around and juggling since I was in the middle of a number of things at work and am not remotely prepared to not be at work finishing those things. Also I would not characterize Hannah as a, uh, low-key child. Sometimes she’s delightfully, supremely independent. But in a two-year old, independence mostly translates to, “I’m gonna do my own thing, dammit. NOW YOU, get on facilitating that.”

However. After this week, oh and this trip next weekend… Okay after two weeks, well, then we will be three weeks away from this wedding. And then after the wedding we will be a week and a half away from dance performances. But after all that, I will damn well settle down and get some fucking rest.

I did more programming yesterday and today. I am definitely more deeply engaged in my work when I spend the day programming. And my back is feeling it. I am as stiff as if I spent the day unmoving.

Who knows, maybe I did.

But it was a productive day. Yesterday I probably had hundreds of errors and threads of things to fix. Today I bet it’s more like 20. I do not typically fix one to two hundred errors in a day. This is an out of the ordinary workflow - the current task involves figurative surgery to remove a home-grown ORM from an application and replace it with Doctrine. As soon as I generated the new model classes and updated our models to extend them, everything broke. (Duh.) And then I’ve spent the last two days putting it all back together. Fun!

I think this fatigue shit is getting worse. Last night I brought the kids home and then I lay down on the couch thinking, “and I’ll get up and start supper in ten minutes.” Yeah, an hour later Ian came home and I was still on the couch by the fire. In part I blame the cold and the rain from yesterday. I got soaked walking to work and didn’t dry out for about 3 hours and then couldn’t warm up all day. I was still chilled through at suppertime.

At around 9:30, I started to think, “my legs feel achey. I should go to bed early.” Twenty minutes later, I started to lose it. My legs were in agony, I couldn’t find the energy to finish sentences, I was swaying when I tried to walk to the kitchen for painkillers. On the way back I sat down in the middle of the floor and then I lay down where I was and burst into tears.

This morning I overslept by an hour and still woke up exhausted. Ian says, “well of course you’re exhausted, you get up at 5 every morning. This would only be sustainable if you went to bed around 9 instead of after 10.” And I say, “okaaaaaay. But you let me sleep in every day this last weekend. After three days of sleeping in, maybe I wouldn’t be all back to normal, but I shouldn’t be in this state.” But who knows what is and is not sustainable. Especially if some little thing is running you down. And trying to stay up later to get stuff done is sure not accomplishing anything. While I am failing to catch up on my sleep, I am also not getting anything done. So maybe I’ll spend a couple of weeks going to bed early and see if that does or doesn’t clear it up.

Obviously every time I duck out of helping Ian fold laundry for tomorrow or making soup for our lunches for the week or even sitting and spending quality time with him and a glass of wine, I freak out a little about how he is going to lose it one day and tell me what a worthless piece of crap I am for never doing anything around the house. This is where people who know Ian laugh in my face and tell me how he’s too good a guy for that. But that’s why the guilt is so compelling isn’t it? Because even the people who say reassuring things are framing it as if it’s pure charity on his part.

The obvious fear is that tending the kids and keeping our daily lives running with suppers and laundry are supposed to be my tasks. And that I haven’t done anything to earn breaks for recuperation.

And if I’m taking un-earned breaks, and god knows I’m not looking sex-ay or putting out since I’m so exhausted, then clearly I’m a dead loss as a spouse. Good thing he’s so benevolent, but better hope he doesn’t realize what a dead weight I am.

Yuck. I could write this off as my own buying into crap about men’s vs. women’s responsibilities. And I am so guilty of giving profuse praise and thanks for changing a diaper. Or for his help putting together wedding invitations. But I’m going to put most of it down to bad past relationship patterns.

I’ve never had a relationship with someone who didn’t keep score before. Ian’s silence on the topic makes me nervous that I don’t know what the score really is. And if he doesn’t tell me up-front what the cost of a break is, in other efforts or in negative impact on his regard for me, surely that means it’s going to be really bad.

The young man who toasts my lunch sandwich hands me the warm foil parcel with a helping of deliberate eye-contact and a coaxing smile. “You’re less sigh-y today.”

“Oh!” I am all awkward chuckles. It was that obvious? “Yeah. I guess my week picked up.”

Back in the office Kitchen, I sit closer to the crowd. We speak of nothing, trivialities, summer camp, birthday parties, make-up. And it’s good. I realize I am just present for this. I am not apart, aching for silence and space because, just now, my own head is uncluttered.

The lunch is finished, a communal brownie is shared and then gone, the wrappers folded and I am cleaning up. And to the man around whom I must lean to load the dishwasher, I have without any effort of will offered a cheerful greeting and my biggest smile. I am buoyed by good spirits and when I move, it rolls off me in waves. From the corner of my eye, I see his eyes widen in response.

In that small demonstration, I read hunger for approval. On any other day, I would accuse myself of projecting.

Today I felt socially powerful. I gave cheerful greetings. My jibes and sallies were gentle. I appeared magnanimous and approving. My skin is a permeable emotional membrane, I think. When I am vulnerable, everything flows in, sets my mind to polluted swirling. And when I am well, it all flows out and washes over everything I touch.

I had a programming task of some magnitude today. It has been three years and I have not done much other than content design and admin and training and documentation. I used to fight hard trying to get more challenging tasks, but I am more resigned these days. I let others take the lead, I back down and defer.

But this week I was to tackle something in concert with two Senior Developers. And by Wednesday, my partners had not been able to free any time. So on Thursday, I started it alone and by the end of Thursday it was barely started and quite overwhelming.

This morning I looked hard at it and I let it overwhelm me. I sunk into it, racing only to see how much I could get done in one day. I was tuning out the world. I was losing track of time.

And I was a far nicer person when I was done.

I feel like I’m having another blog identity crisis. I dunno. I’m a hobby-blogger, not a serious blogger. I’m not going to pick a niche and write for my audience. I have lots of interests - feminism, parenting, belly dance, writing. But I’m not going to dedicate my blog to any one of those because then it would be one of those trying-to-be-a-serious-blogger-blogs. And that’s not me.

I am, at heart, a Diaryland blogger. Personal, off-the-cuff and varied in focus. Which leaves this blog strictly in the personal domain. The problem is that there isn’t any personal stuff I can discuss or have the will to discuss anymore.

Over the years, I’ve evolved into a “don’t talk about work” blogger. Partly that’s maturity. But partly it’s that I have learned that even if I’m saying things that I consider neutral in tone, it doesn’t take much for people to be offended when they feel like you’ve been talking behind their back.

And then I admire the feminist bloggers that I follow, but any time I actually engage in a feminist take-down of something that offends me, the resulting vitriol from men who are experts on What is Emphatically Not Sexism leaves me nauseous and sad.

There are personal life bloggers whom I admire too. People who attack the really visceral things in life and manage to address them with authenticity and candour and to pull enough of a grain of truth out of them that others with similar experiences are comforted by the amount of perspective and validation it gives them. But it is those painful topics that cause the most crisis around here. Scars and the patterns they create are the things I think about the most these days. But, you understand, I can’t talk about the things my ex-husband did because one day my children will be old enough to find these things on the internet. And for the same reason, I can’t talk about some of the more difficult aspects of mothering my children (Hi theoretical future reading children. I hope that doesn’t sound passive aggressive). I can’t talk about my childhood because my family reads this (Hi family. Also, not trying to be passive aggressive with you). I can’t talk about the frustration of trying to earn my way in a male-dominated field because the employers who created that workplace could feel like it was an indictment of the environment that they fostered.

I have some stories that I can draw from that didn’t involve my ex-husband, or my family, or my workplace but they would involve friends or ex-friends who know of the blog and a full exploring of these themes always circles back to other, forbidden topics. And then there are some stories that maybe could be explained without offending or seeming to confront any of the people whose peace of mind I am trying to safeguard. But then we come to just regular vulnerability. And I have coworkers who read this blog. The ones I know about are good friends, and would probably be fine - though maybe they would see me differently. But there are some coworkers with whom I feel it would be inadvisable to allow my vulnerabilities.

These are the things that occupy my mind when I sit down to (not) write. And I frequently think to myself what an interesting, useful and maybe even moving blog I could keep if one day I just sat down and began to tell all the stories I am not supposed to tell. If I were not always so scared of causing confrontation just by speaking honestly. I’m not talking of calling anyone out. I mean the confrontation you cause by speaking out against things and by admitting to anger or admitting to being damaged by something. There will always be people defensive about their part in those situations or those still holding their own silence ready to tell you that you are wrong for calling a situation wrong, worried that you are burning bridges that they like you to have or just anxious to defend the status quo, and anxious for you to go back to being someone who shuts up.

I am, truthfully, someone who shuts up. This is the real tentative, scared doe that I am. Sometimes I catch someone talking about me as if I am somehow strong, or principled or uncompromising. I don’t know how I put that image out there, but it’s not true. I am compromising in every move to dodge the confrontation I speculate may arise, second-guessing everything I have to say. And it’s led to silence. Or rather, it’s led to this. This obvious, vacuous blog of wedding prep and health complaints.

I tried to disagree with something Meredith said in her blog yesterday. But it was worse than disagreeing, because I knew I was taking it personally. And I have so many experiences where I try to say something totally off-hand like, “just need to say that this thing hurt my feelings. Okay, there. That’s all. No big.” And next thing I know somebody is full-on attacking me and telling me that I am impossible to please, trying to script their every move, do not get to dictate what they are and are no allowed to say, do not deserve any sympathy since I hurt their feelings in the way I brought it up, etc, etc.

So after emailing her, I then spent the whole day at work being all, “I am not checking my email. I am not checking my email. This is going to blow up and I don’t want to know until I am at least safely in my car driving home so I won’t cry at work.” But it didn’t blow up. Instead she said, “I love you and I didn’t mean it that way.” Shit. I just about threw up from relief.

That should be encouraging, but really? Imagine now if I actually tried to tell you all something that actually hurt me for real?

Some of you will already know this story. But I was called on my lack of updatery, and this is what you get on short notice.

A few weeks ago I sat down to work on my dress. It had been hanging out for two weeks in a state of “if you will just get around to trimming this seam then you will be able to do some of the fun work of decorating”. But I’ve been suffering from some extreme fatigue lately (yeah, still), so every eligible sewing evening has turned into an evening of moping around on the couch or else retiring to bed early. So on that day, I was determined to get that fire lit again and get moving again on this project (which now has sixweeks to get done. Argh).

The seam to be trimmed was a difficult one, between the bra cup and the silk covering it. So I had to peel back the silk covering to free the seam ends without peeling it so harshly as to stretch the silk or wreck the pleats and then I had to wiggle the scissors in there to trim the seam allowance down so the seam allowance would quit making the bottom of the cup look wrinkled and bulky.

Did I mention the fatigue? As I was trimming, and fighting to keep everything in place, I thought to myself, “holy shit I’m so tired I just want to go lie down.” And then, “I probably shouldn’t be doing such a fussy job when I’m so tired and hungry.” And then, “I’ll just finish this little part and then I’ll be smart and go lie down. I’ll tackle the rest of this when I feel better.” And then, *snip*, WTF?! And then, “Oh, FUCK!”

Because I had snipped a little hole right through the front silk on the cup.

And I dropped the scissors and put my head down in my hands and sat there for a long time. Ian had been cleaning in the kitchen, and he paused. But then he went back to moving around cleaning. And I sat there for a long moment, and a rational internal voice kept trying to reason with me that it was a pretty small hole and I could probably cover it with a sequin and even if I couldn’t, I was certainly capable of re-covering that one bra cup.

But remember the fatigue?

Yeah, fuck reasonableness. I sat there with tears seeping out of my eyes and thinking I had better not cry hard enough to drip on the silk and get it all watermarked. And so I finally stood up, crumpled up the whole dress and threw it in a corner and stomped up to my room, threw myself on the bed and pulled the covers over my head.

Ian came upstairs after me and he said, “is it really bad?” And I took a deep breath and said, “it… it is not too late to call off this whole wedding, right?”

I know, right? Waaaaaaaaah!

Ian was awesome. He just sat down and said, “of course it’s not.” And I said, “yep. Pretty much the only thing we couldn’t get our money back on is the rings.” And he said, “yeah and the rings are cool enough that we could just wear them whether we’re married or not.”

Well. I finally got out of bed and went and put some fray-check on the cut and looked at it long enough to reassure myself that I really could just cover it with a sequin. And then I went back to bed.

And it’s been a couple weeks since then, and I have even been able to do some of that decorating.

I still haven’t covered the hole. There it is, below and to the right of the right-hand flower. However, the more I bedazzle the dress with rhinestones, the less that little rip seems to matter.

I don’t want to make my own dress anymore.

I. Just. Want. This.

The problem with making promises like “pictures to follow” is that it inflates my own expectations so that I never do follow up. Like I’m secretly (not so secretly now) thinking, “well I said pictures were going to follow, so this had better be a planned and well-written post.

Naturally, that meant I was hunkering down with some severe avoidance, ready to not update for a good two weeks.

The truth is that I would love to write a couple of full, well illustrated, detailed blog posts about the process of designing and crafting this dress. But I think that’ll probably wait a bit. Until I can illuminate things with a little hindsight. Right now crafting is still that messy process where I sit there stitching a little bit and stopping a lot to mutter to myself as I work my thoughts backward and forward through what the best way is to do a thing and what the next step will be. I had a friend over yesterday for a stitch-n-bitch, and then mostly I ignored her and talked to myself all afternoon as I worked out the tricky business of sewing the cups onto the dress without wrecking (and needing to redo) the pleats that I had just carefully planned and pinned.

Anyhow, check it out:

The right cup is still held on with pins, but as soon as I sew that right cup into place then I can pretty much move on to decorating it. I still need to cover the straps. And I need someone to come over and cut the hem for me while I wear it. And then, obviously, I will need to hem it. But that’s really it.

I’m so excited that I finally get to think about decorating it now. The swarovski crystals are in the mail.

Also! A length of copper-coloured egyptian beaded fringe! Yes!!!

I mean, right now it just looks like a wedding dress (albeit, a pretty plain one). But when I put some fringe on the hips? Shimmy-town!