Slipping into a dress I wore in 8th grade

I have vowed to turn 40 fabulously this year. I will be wearing heels that make my chiropracter cringe and insisting upon skinny jeans and slathering on entirely too much glitter eyeliner. Sure, underneath all that will be heaps of heel pads, Spanx and moisturizer, but the outside will look fucking phenomenal.

Over the weekend, one of those miracle age-defying images came to life in my mother's living room.

"There's a beautiful pink dress for you!" Lil E squealed when I walked in the door. My mom had placed it, still wrapped in dry-cleaner plastic, lovingly on a floral-upholstered chair for me.

"Is it from a wedding you were in? Prom? WHAT?!" My mother was shouting that from the kitchen. She was at the stove, stirring something, surely.

I couldn't imagine where it was from. A pink dress?

But when I unwrapped it and saw that it was tucked in with my eighth-grade graduation robe, also a strange mauve color, I knew exactly where that mystery poof of satin came from.

I wore it in a quinceanera when I was fourteen. It was royal blue back then and the measurements appeard to be in the single digits. The gowns had been stored in the attic next to a crocheted dress of my mother's from the late 60s. Sun and dust and shame of the 80s had faded them. Once upon a time in the years of Sears training bras and size-zero stirrup pants, I wore these gowns. My arms slid into the Barbie-bicep holes and the pleats flared out from my boyish waist. My hair was the biggest thing in the picture of me doing some choreographed dance with thirteen other girls in my class in honor of one of my friends.

"I bet you will look beautiful in that dress!" Lil E said. Damn, he's good.

I didn't tell him it was half the size I am now. Maybe less.

"Try it on," he added sweetly.

And so I carefully tugged on the zipper, still royal blue and perfectly in tact, and held my breath as I stepped into it. I would have done it properly - over the head - but I was afraid Wham and a whole bucket of rubber bracelets might fall out, maybe my red Sally Jesse Raphael glasses. That, and I might never loose myself and have to live out this decade swathed in a dress that now looks like a Golden Girls' comforter.

Inhaaaaaale and slide up annnnnnd....then something miraculous!

I might be almost 40, but dammit, I can still fit in that dress. A smidge squeezy, but come on! It covers all the right places (and then some).

"It IS beautiful! It DOES fit!" Lil E let out and naturally, I nodded and smiled.

I smoothed that satin across my chest and waist and stood taller: That's right! I grew boobs! And a fetus! And something on my thighs clearly derived from Doritos and French Vanilla Creamer in the early 2000s! But that dress fits me like a glove.

A child's hand-me-down communion glove, but a glove just the same.

If you're going to judge by the way I work that grammar-school formal attire, then 40 is going to be just fine.

 

I might just have to buy myself a Cuarentanera dress, which I am thinking would be slightly more Rainbow than the lovely Traveling Red Dress Project. Not that the one from the quinceanera isn't divine and figure-flattering. It's just that these might better reflect where I am at this stage of my life now.But it's just so hard to choose!